


A History of Skin

by cheesethesecond



Series: History of Skin [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: ...kind of, 5+1 Things, Captain America: The First Avenger, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sap and Sadness, Suicide Attempt, Team Dynamics, Touch-Starved, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 09:29:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3129551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheesethesecond/pseuds/cheesethesecond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky and Steve were made and unmade by each other’s hands.</p><p>[Or, five touches that defined Bucky Barnes, and one that didn’t.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Promise (4)

**Author's Note:**

> This is literally just an excuse for me to write six chapters of Bucky Barnes being the handsiest touchiest-feeliest bastard, especially where a certain Star Spangled Man with a Plan is concerned. Will span from pre-movies to post-Winter Soldier. Tags'll update as we go. I am the sappiest sap to ever sap and I won't apologize for that, but, you know. It's something you should be aware of.

Bucky Barnes couldn’t breathe. 

It wasn’t something he was used to. He could outrun all the boys in his class by almost a full second, and was always the last to call it quits after a long day in the sun, dripping sweat and begging for _just one more inning, aw c’mon, it ain’t even dark yet_. Bucky took the deep, easy breaths of the healthy, inhaling and exhaling without a thought. But he knew what it was like, not being able to breathe, because Steve had told him about it a bunch of times—how it felt like someone sitting on your chest until you got dizzy and couldn’t stop coughing and had to gulp for air like a fish on land, and Bucky had laughed at that, and they had run around Sarah Rogers’ tiny apartment puckering their lips and flopping around on the floor and flapping their arms like useless fins before collapsing into a giggling heap.

This was kind of the same, Bucky thought, except kind of different. He was dizzy and gasping, sure, but his mouth also tasted tangy, like that time Charlie Dorato punched him so hard in the face he lost a tooth. Steve never mentioned anything like that. Bucky's legs felt heavy, like sandbags, but he kept running.

He was crying, too, his throat raw and his nose leaking and his face sticky. It wasn’t actually funny, when Steve gasped like a fish for real, and sometimes Steve cried because he couldn’t breathe. That wasn’t why Bucky was crying, though it didn’t help. He’d have to remember to tell Steve that, if he got there in time. _If you cry, it only makes it worse_ , Bucky would tell him. _So don’t cry, Stevie. Breathe_.

Steve was sick a lot. Bucky would get the flu, spend a day in bed puking, and bounce right back. But Steve would always miss a few days of school, no matter what kind of sick he had. That was alright with Bucky, because then he’d get to swing by the Rogers’ with a tin of soup from his Ma and Steve’s homework, most of which he did for Steve, sitting cross-legged on the bed, while Steve made up stories that had Bucky’s sides aching with laughter. Steve was the funniest guy Bucky knew.

But this time was different. Steve had missed a whole _week_ , and when Bucky tried to bring soup over, Sarah Rogers hadn’t even let him through the door. Bucky had stood on his tip-toes, craned his neck to see if Steve was bundled up on the couch, so he could stick his tongue out and cross his eyes and make Steve laugh. “You’ll just wake him up,” Sarah said, giving Bucky’s shoulder a light shove. “Or worse, I’ll send you back to your ma having caught what he’s got.” And Bucky hadn’t worried, not really, because Steve was sleeping, and sleep was good for getting better. Bucky was tired of playing center field _and_ right field during baseball after school, even though when Steve played right, Bucky still caught most of the balls for him anyway. That didn’t matter. It was just boring without him.

So that day—Monday, a brand new week—Bucky had brought his new comic book for Steve to read, since he figured Steve would still be too tired to play. But Steve wasn’t there. And Bucky still didn't worry, he _didn't_ , he was just disappointed, because he and Steve hadn’t been apart this long, not since the day Bucky, at the top of his lungs, had declared them best friends during their third trip around the Wonder Wheel, while Steve smacked him with the teddy bear they'd won together on the boardwalk. He just _missed_ Steve. That wasn’t the same as worrying.

He was tired of playing ball without Steve, though, so he sat down on the curb to read his comic, even though he’d already read it twice, when Joey Farrell came over with Dick Olsen and asked, “What’s the matter with Rogers?”

Bucky shrugged. He didn’t like Joey or Dick. They always gave Steve a hard time because he couldn’t run very fast to first base. “Dunno. He’s just sick, is all.”

“My ma says it ain’t right, how much he’s sick,” Dick said. “Says there’s something wrong with him.”

“You and your ma can shut up,” Bucky said, hands clenching around the comic. “Ain’t nothing wrong with him.”

“Well _my_ ma says because he’s so sick this time, he’s probably not gonna last much longer. Says once it gets cold again, he’s probably done for,” Joey said, and Bucky was on his feet, shoving Joey so hard he skidded down to the street, nearly toppling ass over head.

“I told you to shut up,” Bucky growled.

Dick scowled at him, and Joey cradled his bloody elbow, seethed, “He’s probably dying right now,” though he couldn’t keep his lower lip from wobbling.

“Shut up, shut up, shut _up_!” Bucky lunged for Joey, but Dick shoved him back, spat, “Maybe he’s already _dead_ ,” and Bucky lost it.

He'd gotten a few good punches in before Joey and Dick scattered, black-eyed and covered in dirt; took a couple, too—he could feel his lip stinging, his cheek swelling. His knuckles were scraped raw. But it hadn’t mattered because he suddenly remembered something his Ma had said to his Dad a few nights before, while he’d been sprawled out on the floor doing a puzzle with Becca, when they thought he wasn’t listening—“Gonna be a rough go for that Rogers boy.”

 _He’s probably dying right now_.

And Bucky started running.

He ran and ran, and somewhere along the way he’d started crying and couldn’t stop, and couldn’t breathe, because what if they knew something he didn’t, what if they were _right_ , what if Steve actually _was_ dying, he’d been gone for so long and Bucky hadn’t even been allowed to see him, and Bucky was smart, he knew when adults were trying to hide things from him, how they talked in low voices and stared at him for a little too long and smiled so tight their eyes squinted.

What if Steve was dying? What if Steve was _dead_?

By the time Bucky got to the Rogers’ apartment, he was shuddering with sobs. He pounded on the door until he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees, chest and shoulders heaving.

“James Barnes,” Sarah Rogers breathed as she answered the door, startled, “what in heaven’s name—”

“ _Steve_ ,” was all Bucky could wail, wiping his eyes frantically with the backs of his hands.

Sarah’s eyes softened. “Bucky, honey,” she said, cupping the back of his head with a gentle hand. “Come inside, c’mon.”

Steve wasn’t on the couch in the living room, and Bucky cried even harder, because Steve hated being in bed during the day, only stayed there when he was _really_ sick, when he got cold and shook so hard his teeth chattered.

“Sweetheart, calm down,” Sarah said, kneeling in front of Bucky and taking his shoulders, rubbing his arms. “Calm down, shh. Tell me what’s wrong.”

Bucky sniffled, his breath hitching. He knew he was too old to be crying like a baby, to be scared like one, too, but the empty couch and all those words jumbled up in his head— _sick, wrong, done, dying, dead_ —made his stomach feel icy, like he’d swallowed a bunch of cold water too fast. “Steve,” he babbled, “is he…where is…I want to…can I…I need to…is he… _is he_?”

“Slow down,” Sarah said, brushing Bucky’s hair off his sweaty forehead and frowning. “Steve’s in the bedroom. He’s sleeping.”

“He’s not…” Bucky’s gaze darted around the room, restless fingers tugging at the hem of his shirt. “He’s okay?”

“Oh, Bucky,” Sarah said, pressing a rough kiss to his forehead and pulling him to her. Bucky threw his arms around her neck, buried his face in her shoulder as she rubbed his back. “Steve’s fine. He’s just fine. Feeling better today, but still tired. Too tired to go to school, but that’s all, hmm? That’s all.”

Bucky nodded. He felt a little stupid for getting so worked up, but most of him shivered with relief. He let Sarah hold him and squeezed his eyes shut and tried to forget all the stuff he’d been thinking—what it would feel like if there was no one in right field to tell him _Nice catch, Buck_ ; if there was no one to lend him pencils when he’d chewed all his up; if there was no one sitting beside him at the top of the Wonder Wheel, helping him rock the cart back and forth and pretending not to see how tight Bucky gripped the rail because he was just a little afraid of heights. Bucky thought it might feel like never wanting to laugh again, because without Steve, things just weren’t as funny.

Bucky squirmed, impatient to see Steve, and Sarah pulled back to wipe her thumbs across his cheeks. “Did someone tell you Steve wasn’t alright?” she asked, and Bucky nodded, but was already looking past her, over her shoulder. “Bucky,” she said, turning his chin towards her. “Who said that?”

“Joey Farrell and his ma,” Bucky said, his eyes flickering back and forth from her face to the bedroom door. “And Dick Olsen and his ma.” He decided not to say anything about his own Ma.

Sarah huffed. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked tired, suddenly. “I suppose you want to see him, then?” Bucky nodded, overenthusiastic, and Sarah laughed. “Alright, but you can’t go in there all excited and work him up, you hear me? He’s still trying to get better.”

“I swear I’ll be quiet,” Bucky said, “I swear,” and Sarah nodded.

“Let’s get you cleaned up first,” she said, got a rag and some cold water and wiped Bucky’s face and hands, dabbed at his lip and shook her head but didn’t say anything about it. By the time she was done, Bucky was bouncing on his toes. “Alright, go on in,” she said, and Bucky had to stop himself from running.

He opened the bedroom door and walked softly to the bed, where Steve was curled up on his side, wrapped in blankets, snoring. He was a little pale, but not much more than usual, and his hair was sticking up all over the pillow. One of Steve’s hands was dangling over the edge of the bed, out of the covers, and Bucky stared at it, his fingers curling, itching to touch.

“You won’t break him, sweetheart,” Sarah said from behind him, not quite whispering, and Bucky reached out, took Steve’s hand in both of his and squeezed. He felt the creases of Steve’s palm and the ridges of his knuckles under his thumbs, closed his eyes and imagined he could trace Steve’s fingerprints onto his own hands. He could already feel his breath easing in his chest, and he wished, childishly but fervently, that he could ease Steve’s breath, too, just by holding his hand.

When Bucky opened his eyes, Steve was blinking back at him. He yawned, wriggled under the covers, but didn’t pull his hand away. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “You trying to tell my fortune?”

Bucky smiled back so hard his face hurt. “Hmm,” he said, his forehead knitting in fake concentration as he brought Steve’s hand up to eye level. He squinted at Steve’s palm, traced his finger over the line at the top, the longest wrinkle. He had no idea what any of them meant, but he said, anyway, “Think this is the life line. Look how far it goes. All the way around to the back of your hand. You’re gonna live _forever,_ Stevie,” he whispered with mock reverence, and Steve laughed, and Bucky felt like someone had untied a knot inside him. He laced his fingers through Steve’s and let their hands drop down beside the bed. He wasn’t ready to let go just yet.

“I miss much at school?” Steve asked, and Bucky shrugged, swinging their hands back and forth. Steve's eyes narrowed. “What's wrong with your face?”

“What’s wrong with _your_ face?” Bucky scoffed, looking down at his shoes.

“Is your lip swollen? And why are your eyes so red?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Did you get in a fight? Did someone hit you?” Steve tried to lift himself up against the pillow, but a cough bubbled its way out of his chest and he reached over for a handkerchief, hacking into it.

“Ew,” Bucky said, wrinkling his nose.

“Yeah,” Steve said, inspecting the blob of rubbery mucus he’d spit out. “At least it’s not green this time.”

“Gross!” Bucky nearly squealed, and they grinned at each other.

“Alright, I think that’s quite enough for one day,” Sarah said, putting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “You’ll already be home late, not to mention filthy and with a shiner and probably whatever’s left of Steve’s chest infection, and you’re gonna hear all about it from your ma.” Bucky winced. It was his Dad, really, who didn’t like him hanging out with Steve too much, said he was a bad influence, that Bucky’s grades were down, that he was getting into more trouble, but it was only because he was helping Steve—with his homework, because he missed so much; with the fights he always seemed to find, or that always seemed to find him—and his Ma always said it was good to help people. Still, if his Dad found out he’d been fighting, especially because of Steve, he knew he wouldn’t be allowed to play ball, not for a few weeks at least.

Bucky sighed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,” he said.

“Maybe,” Sarah said, before Steve could answer. “ _If_ he isn’t coughing as bad. Which means he needs to rest. Which means _you_ need to scoot.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, squeezing Steve’s hand again—once, twice, three times, and Steve did the same—before letting go, the heat of Steve’s fingers lingering. “Come back as quick as you can, okay?” His voice caught a little at the end, but that was alright, because it was just Steve, and Steve understood.

“Okay,” Steve said, and tucked his hand back under the covers, where he could keep it warm while Bucky was away.

“You go straight home,” Sarah said as she nudged Bucky out the door. “Don’t go looking to stir up trouble with Joey Farrell or Dick Olsen. I’ll talk to their mothers and set them straight, so you leave them alone, understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Bucky said.

Sarah placed her hands over Bucky’s ears, shook him a little, and kissed the top of his head. “Don’t listen to what anybody else says, Bucky Barnes. You don’t need to be scared for Steve. If he's got you, he'll be just fine.”

Bucky nodded, solemn, feeling the echoes of Steve’s hand in his. He would not let anything happen to Steve, not as long as he could reach out, hold something of Steve to him. Bucky would always be reaching for him, and maybe someday, he'd find a way to soothe Steve's aches with the brush of their fingers, the same way it soothed Bucky’s worried heart.


	2. Push (3)

“There’s still a lot to do, Buck,” Steve said, shrugging out of his coat and sneaking a glance over his shoulder, and that was all the invitation Bucky needed to follow him into the apartment.

Steve had said he’d wanted to be alone, and Bucky was going to respect that, though he couldn’t say he understood it. Bucky hardly ever wanted to be alone (especially when being alone meant being without Steve). When he was upset, he sought people, warm bodies within arm’s reach, to take up space and settle his rattling thoughts. When he wanted quiet, he wanted quiet _with_ someone, secure in the knowledge that whenever he wanted the quiet to end, all he had to do was open his mouth and be heard.

But he’d never lost anyone, not like Steve had. A grandmother he hadn't been close to, a baby cousin who never made it out of the hospital, but not a parent. A _mother_. That kind of grief was inconceivable to Bucky, though he’d grieved for Sarah Rogers in his own way. He’d been staying with his folks, waiting for news that came just after midnight, less than seventy-two hours after Sarah had been taken to the hospital. Bucky had been ready to run straight to Steve, started throwing on clothes, tripping over his shoelaces, tangling his arms so thoroughly in his jacket that he nearly ripped the thing in half trying to get it off again. He grunted and seethed in useless fury until his own Ma intervened, easing him to the ground as he started crying, slipping the jacket off, kneeling beside him and holding his shoulders as he buried his face in his hands and sobbed for this woman who was not his mother, but was someone Bucky had nevertheless, and with childish abandon, given a considerable portion of his heart to a long time ago.

His Ma used to warn him about that— _you keep breaking off pieces of that little heart of yours and tossing them out willy nilly_ , she’d said, once, while Bucky stood red-faced and dejected, calling for the stray dog he’d been feeding for weeks, the one he hadn’t seen for three days running, _you won’t have anything left for yourself—_ but it was impossible for Bucky to keep that part of himself contained, the part that wanted to reach out and pull people to him. To pull a skinny kid with a fat lip up off the street, just so he could stick himself between that kid and the world. What good was a heart, anyway, if you kept it to yourself?

But Steve’s posture that day—shoulders hunched, eyes averted, jaw clenched—sent a clear message: _stay away_. So Bucky had given him space at the funeral, sat two pews behind and paid more attention to the back of Steve’s head than the service. And after, he’d watched Steve from the outskirts of the cemetery, swallowed the lump in his throat as Steve stared down at a patch of fresh dirt. He’d turned to blink up at the sky, drying his eyes, and when he turned back, Steve had disappeared. And Bucky decided that was enough space.

Of course, he’d found Steve exactly where he thought he would, sitting on the bottom step of his apartment building, head bowed and picking at his fingers, waiting, like Bucky had been the one to fall behind.

“You didn’t stick around long,” Bucky said, leaning up against the railing and kicking at Steve’s fingers with his toe. “Quit that.”

Steve smiled, a whisper of a thing, and shrugged. “Said my goodbyes a while ago. No use in doing it twice, especially when she’s not around to hear it.”

And Bucky had made his offer right then and there, following Steve up the rickety staircase. He had a place of his own now, nothing much, nothing fancy, recently rented with the money he’d saved doing various odd jobs over the years—selling newspapers with Steve, working construction, helping out around his uncle’s shop fixing electrical equipment (he had good hands and a head for problems, and was promised steady work _as soon as I can give it, son, I promise, but you know how the times are_ ). It wasn’t big—living room, kitchen, bedroom, the basics—but as far as Bucky was concerned, it had more than enough space for Steve.

Steve, who tucked things to his heart and held them close, ready to seal them away. Bucky was not going to let him do that. Bucky was not going to let him stay in an empty house and turn to stone in the silence.

“Looks like you got a pretty decent head start here,” Bucky said, nudging the door shut behind him and raising his eyebrows. There were boxes shoved up against the walls, filled with odds and ends, hair brushes, blouses, jewelry. Though the Rogers never had much, their home always bordered on cluttered. With both Sarah and Steve working as often as they could, there wasn’t much time to tidy (Sarah made a point of apologizing for the state of things, earnestly at first, then as a running joke whenever Bucky came over). Surfaces were strewn with half-finished books, shoes to be shined, aprons to be mended, drying laundry, dulled pencils, Steve’s drawings. Now, everything of Sarah’s was in one box or another, and everything of Steve’s was pushed into corners, making the apartment feel expansive in a way it never had, in a way that echoed in Bucky’s chest.

“We knew this was coming,” Steve said, rolling up his sleeves and reaching for a box and a rumpled pile of skirts on the table. “There was time to get things in order.”

Bucky winced. “Yeah, but they’re not gonna kick you out tonight,” he said, pulling a chair out and straddling it backward, folding his arms over the top and resting his chin on his hand. “You’ve got some time, right?”

“Figure I can afford another month or two, maybe three with what I’ve got saved.”

Bucky frowned. “What you’ve got saved for art school, you mean.”

Steve’s breath hitched in what Bucky wouldn’t dare call a laugh, not when it was laced with that much bitterness. “I’m not gonna kid myself, Buck. It was a nice thought, but that’s all it was. I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

“Well, what about all this stuff?”

“What about it?”

“You gonna sell it?”

Steve shook his head, vehement. “No. Of course not. I’ll take it to a shelter. Somewhere it’ll do some good.”

“Right. Because selling it wouldn’t do you any good.”

“Buck.”                                                                

“All I’m saying is if you don’t plan on keeping any of it, the least you could do is let yourself—”

“I wouldn’t even get that much for it.”

“Enough to keep your head above water. At least until you stop being an idiot and take me up on my offer.”

“Stop it, Bucky. Just…stop.” Steve gripped the edge of the table and took a deep breath. “It’s gonna do someone else a lot better than it’d do me. And that’s what she’d want. To help as many people as she could with what little she had.”

“Yeah, but she’d also want you to—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Steve snapped, “tell me what she would want,” and Bucky clamped his mouth shut, nodded, let himself be cowed. Air whistled harsh and ragged through Steve’s nose, and he shook his head like he was trying to jerk something free. “Leave it _alone_ , alright?”

“Yeah, alright,” Bucky said, eager to reach out and smooth his hand down the back of Steve’s neck, to ease a little of the tension, but knowing from the prickly silence between them that Steve wouldn’t allow it. He stood, instead, spun his chair back around and shoved his hands into his pockets, rocked back and forth on his heels while Steve ran a hand through his hair and reached out for one of the skirts, began to fold it with shaking hands. “Honestly, pal,” Bucky said, soft and low, “you don’t gotta do this right now.”

“What exactly do you want me to do, then?” Steve asked through clenched teeth, bundling the soft fabric in his hands and refusing to look up from the table. “Curl up in bed and cry?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not.”

“How ‘bout I make you something to eat?” Bucky didn’t wait for an answer, strolled into the kitchen with as much nonchalance as he could muster and started rummaging through the cabinets, finding little more than a loaf of bread, a can of beans, a few wilted vegetables. He whistled. “Nevermind. Guess we gotta go shopping first. C’mon, let’s get stuff for pancakes. I’ll make a big ol’ stack.”

“I’m not hungry,” Steve said.

Bucky wandered back out to the table, crossed his arms and tried to grin at Steve. “Then let’s go down to the diner. You get a cup of coffee and I’ll eat enough pancakes for the both of us.”

Steve closed his eyes. His hands stilled and dropped to the table like they were all at once too heavy to hold up. “Go if you want.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, his throat tightening. He could barely keep himself from falling to his knees, wanted to wrap his arms around Steve’s legs and beg him to do something, _anything_ , other than stand, hushed and simmering, disassembling the final pieces of his mother while Bucky floundered.

“I mean it,” Steve said, burying his fingers in white cotton. “Go home, Buck.”

“I’m not just gonna leave you here.”

“Why not? I don’t need your help with this.”

“Would you let me do _something_ for you?”

Steve shoved the pile of clothes away. “I don’t want your pity, Barnes,” he said, voice flat and cold, elbowing past Bucky with enough force to knock him off balance, and that was _enough_. Before Steve could take another step towards the bedroom, Bucky reached out and grabbed his arm, circled his fingers around Steve’s wrist and yanked him back, hard.

 _You won’t break him, sweetheart_ , Sarah Rogers had said to Bucky once, when Bucky was terrified the world had stolen Steve from him. And he’d taken that to heart. Most everyone treated Steve like he was made of cracked glass—one wrong move and he’d shatter to pieces, and no one wanted to clean up the mess. Bucky knew better. Bucky patched Steve up after every fight, dabbed blood and swiped grit from open wounds; sat beside his bed through every illness, mopped sweat and tears and bile; saw, intimately, the stuff Steve was made of. To think Steve Rogers was made of glass was ridiculous, because that implied that he could be destroyed, disintegrated, crushed to dust. (A tiny part of Bucky still believed Steve might live forever.) Steve was a scab, picked over again and again and always, unfailingly able to knit himself back together.

The world reached out to Steve with delicate fingers, and Steve hated it, railed against it, shook off hesitant touches with a limitless supply of resentment. So Bucky pawed at Steve, covered Steve’s bony shoulders with the expanse of his hands, shook him, tugged him, pinched him, shoved him. When he wanted Steve to look at something, he dug an elbow into his side. When he wanted Steve to follow him, he grabbed his hand and started running. When he wanted Steve near, he pulled him there.

When he wanted Steve’s attention, he took it.

“Listen to me,” Bucky said, tightening his hold on Steve’s wrist and pressing a thumb to his pulse point.

Steve straightened, deliberate, and glared at Bucky, tried to shake himself out of Bucky’s grip, more obstinate than uncomfortable. “Would you give it a goddamn _rest_ , Bucky, I—”

“ _Listen_ to me,” Bucky repeated, and Steve went still, though the glint in his eyes was no less lethal. “I have not pitied you _once_ in my entire life. I don’t do any of the shit I do because I feel bad for you, and if you think I do, then somewhere along the line you got a pretty fucked up notion of what this friendship is.”

Steve huffed, annoyed, his gaze fixed on the far wall.

“Hey.” Bucky shook his arm, brought his hand up to the side of Steve’s neck, drawing Steve’s eyes back to his. “Seriously. If you really think that, then we’re gonna have a problem, Rogers. Is that what you think?”

Steve’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t need you to take care of me,” he said, the fight in him dissolving. Bucky could read his exhaustion in the heavy downturn of his mouth, the slow flutter of his eyelids.

“I know that. I’m not trying to take care of you,” Bucky said, rubbing his thumb against the underside of Steve’s wrist. “I’m trying to let you steady up, get your feet under you. You think you gotta do everything yourself, and I keep telling you, you don’t. Get that through your thick skull. I want to _help_.”

Steve sighed, dramatically so, and Bucky would’ve found it funny except for the catch in his breath, the shivery exhale. He shut his eyes and nodded. “I guess I’ll let you make me pancakes.”

Bucky laughed, loud and startled, and released Steve’s wrist only to throw an arm around the back of his neck, heaving Steve into his chest. He thought about the procession of elderly women who’d lined up to ghost tentative hands over Steve at the funeral, withering arms wrapping him in careful embraces, and pressed his fingers into Steve’s back, like he could imprint part of himself there. “Wasn’t really talking about pancakes, punk,” he said, pressing a series of rough kisses to Steve’s temple.

“Don’t think I could stay awake long enough for you to make ‘em,” Steve muttered, and Bucky squeezed him tight before pulling away.

“C’mon,” he said, pushing Steve towards the couch.

“What’re you doing?”

“Like when we were kids,” Bucky said, tossing the couch cushions to the floor. He rummaged in the boxes against the wall while Steve blinked sleepily at him from the arm of the couch.

“I have a bed.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, emerging with a quilt, a patchwork of blues, pinks, greens, and reds that had Steve suddenly blinking back tears. "This is better." He wrapped it around Steve, and remembered Steve at twelve, recovering from pneumonia, only his eyes and the fluff of his hair poking out of the quilt. It was snowing, and he was tucked up against Sarah’s side while she read aloud from _The Waste Land_. Bucky was absently scratching at the warm skin of Steve’s ankle, lulled by the cadence of Sarah’s voice matching the rise and fall of Steve’s chest. ( _April is the cruelest month_ , she read, and Bucky had shifted closer to Steve, figuring whoever wrote that must not understand just how cruel a winter could be.)

Bucky turned out the lights and tugged Steve to the ground, let them both get settled before reaching out to take Steve’s wrist again, thumb to heartbeat. “I’m not asking you to move outta here tomorrow, you know,” he whispered. “I’m just saying. There’s space for you. There’s always space for you.”

Steve was quiet long enough that Bucky thought he’d fallen asleep, before he murmured, “I can pay you something.”

“Sure,” Bucky said. “And you can save something, too. You can take your time. And think about art school.”

“Maybe,” Steve said, and that was victory enough. Bucky fell asleep to the familiar thump of Steve’s pulse under his finger, and woke hours later to the sound of thick, shuddering breaths, to Steve hunched over his knees, biting his hand, trying to cry without making a sound.

Bucky would not let him turn to stone in the silence.

“Stevie,” he said, and wrapped an arm around Steve, tipped him sideways until his head was pillowed on Bucky’s thigh, fished for Steve’s hand and let him sob until the sun rose.


	3. Indulge (2)

It was Christmas Eve, and Bucky was going to sleep in.

He was usually up with the sun, liked getting a jump on the day and the rituals an early morning allowed—breakfast, coffee, basking in the buzz of a waking city. Steve was the heavy sleeper; left to his own devices, he would sleep straight through until noon, and hate himself for it. His body already worked overtime to keep him alive, and Steve had a tendency to push himself to the limit in whatever he was doing—for work or school or, hell, he could find trouble going to the pictures, if he wanted—and then just a little farther out of spite. It _would_ wear a guy out. If it was up to Bucky, Steve would get to sleep for as long as he wanted, but Steve wouldn’t have it, asked to be woken with Bucky every morning, and if Bucky always gave him an extra hour, how was Steve to know?

So Bucky woke, true to form, at 6am. He could hear Steve snoring in the corner and rolled over, tugged the blanket up to his ears and let himself drift, loose-limbed in the satisfaction that there was nothing to do, nowhere to be. This was his Christmas gift to himself: a whole day of lazing in bed, padding around the apartment in stocking feet, bottomless mugs of coffee, naps on the couch. He could be convinced to leave the house, but only with Steve, and only to do something entirely inane. They’d take the train to Manhattan to see the tree in Rockefeller Center, or stroll past the department store windows all lit up and decorated, or they could stay in Brooklyn, build a snowman in the park, start a snowball fight that would leave them soaked and grinning and racing for home. 

These were the kinds of luxuries Bucky wouldn’t have much longer.

He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned, buried his face in the pillow. He wasn’t going to think about that. Not today. Today was for _him_ , and he wasn’t going to think about leaving Brooklyn in a few short weeks, leaving Steve, getting ready to leave the country, to—

 _No_ , Bucky thought, pulling the blanket over his head. He curled in tight, tucked his arms to his chest, listened again for the sound of Steve’s breathing and let it settle him, lull him back to sleep.

A few hours later, he woke up sweating. He squirmed out of his nest of heat and stale air, rubbed a hand through his hair and over his eyes. He lifted himself up on his elbows and glanced over at Steve’s bare mattress, noticed the two extra blankets on his own bed. Bucky fell back to the pillow with a sigh, kicked the blankets off and stared at a crack in the ceiling. As much as he’d wanted to sleep in, he’d also wanted to be up before Steve, to try and soothe Steve’s temper right out of the gate with breakfast. It didn’t always work, but Bucky believed in the power of a full stomach to soften even the worst of moods.

And oh, what a mood Steve had been in. Bucky couldn’t blame him, really—the whole country had been on pins and needles since the attack on Pearl Harbor, the inevitability of war sending everyone into a tailspin of terror and a flurry of activity to combat it. His father had been somber during Bucky’s last visit, and his mother wept through dinner, wiping her eyes between nibbles of mashed potatoes. His sisters, bless them, tried to chatter the unease away, but by the end of the night—after he’d spun the girls in his arms and peppered their cheeks with kisses, wrapped his Ma in a crushing hug, let his father’s handshake linger—he’d wanted to _run_ from the house, dropped down to the curb three blocks away and cradled his head in his hands until he could breathe again.

But Steve had become a coiled spring, a stick of dynamite with a rapidly shortening fuse. They’d gone down to the recruiting office a few days after the attack, where they stood in line for hours with hundreds of other angry boys Bucky knew hadn’t given a second thought to war or chaos or their own death before this moment. That, at least, was something Steve had on them—not brawn or skill, but the experience of facing his own death head-on, of knowing what the tunneling of the end felt like. Steve understood death, lived with it in his bones and his lungs and his heart, and was still willing. He had courage enough for every man in line there in Brooklyn, every man in line across the country.

But they weren’t going to let Steve into the Army. Bucky knew this, and spent those long hours feeling more and more like a coward, for not having the nerve to say so.

At home, after his 4F, Steve had punched a wall before disappearing into the bedroom, slammed the door so hard Bucky thought he might’ve done some real damage to the hinges. And Bucky hadn’t done a thing to stop it, sat himself down at the kitchen table and stared at the wall because Steve needed the release, and Bucky…

Well, they hadn’t rejected Bucky.

He’d known they wouldn’t, had time to prepare, and was proud to serve his country, to put on the uniform and protect the people he loved. He was proud, and his father was proud, and his country was proud, but pride didn’t fill the pit in his stomach or ease the anxious clench of his heart.

Steve had reemerged an hour later, his knuckles bandaged, steadier but with a new sharp edge of resolve, and asked Bucky to train him, teach him boxing, take him running, get him ready for another line, another physical, another try at signing his life away. And Bucky said yes, because it was Steve, and he was still a coward, and he needed something to focus on that wasn’t Camp McCoy, six weeks from next Monday.

So they trained, every day they could. Steve pushed himself to the brink of exhaustion, snarled wordlessly when Bucky suggested he take it easy, fell hard into sleep every night, wandered the apartment like a ghost, shut up in his head, absent and only ever half-aware of Bucky.

Bucky was so goddamn _tired_ of it.

Sighing, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, pushed himself up to his tip-toes and stretched his arms over his head. Whatever mood Steve was in this morning, Bucky was determined to wheedle some cheer out of him. He grabbed one of the blankets and bundled it around his shoulders, shuffled out to the kitchen and was surprised to find Steve sitting at the table, reading. His sketchbook was open, scribbled in and seemingly abandoned in favor of Bucky’s worn copy of _The Big Sleep,_ which he was bent over with his chin in his hands. At the sound of Bucky’s footsteps, Steve smiled down at the book. “About time, you big lug.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bucky muttered, scrunching his nose at Steve.

“Thought maybe you died. Was about to start going through your things.”

“Looks like you already started,” Bucky said, nodding at the book. “Scavenger. Can’t a guy live one day as a lazy bum without you snatching up all his worldly possessions?”

“Sure. But you’ve been a lazy bum so long, I figured it was all fair game.”

“Oh, you’re funny.” Bucky kicked at Steve’s shin under the table. “A real wise guy.”

“Coffee’s on the stove, jerk,” Steve said, and Bucky grinned, rubbed his nose on the top of Steve’s head and pressed a quick kiss there on his way by. Steve seemed, not just in a passable mood, but a _good_ one. Bucky could definitely work with that.

He poured himself a mug of coffee, slid into the chair across from Steve and inhaled the steam with gusto. Wrapping his hands around the mug, he took a long swallow and let out an exaggerated _ahh_. “I take it all back. You’re a real American hero, Steve Rogers.”

“Calm down, Barnes, it’s just coffee.”

Bucky laughed, his chest feeling looser than it had in weeks. “You got big plans to finish that book?”

“Not really. Just killing time ‘til you woke up.”

“Good,” Bucky said, suddenly itching to grab Steve by the hand and tug him around the city, to look and hear and feel and _be_ in New York. He was not going to waste the opportunity, a hint of sunshine through the dreary muddle that had become their routine. Especially not now, with so little time left to—

“We’re going out,” Bucky said, smacking his hand on the table. “Get dressed. It’s not snowing too bad, is it? Nah, put a scarf on, you’ll be fine.”

Steve shut the book, the corner of his mouth twitching. “Didn’t think I’d be able to drag you off the couch today.”

“Let’s go see the big tree, huh? I hear it’s all patriotic this year, and they’ve got an actual reindeer down by the skating rink.”

“Oh.” Steve frowned. “I thought…”

“What, you got some crazy plans of your own?”

“I just thought we’d go down to the Y, get a few rounds in on the bag.”

Bucky’s shoulders slumped. He should’ve known. Of course that’s what Steve wanted to do. Of course today was no different—Steve’s pig-headedness did not take holidays. “On Christmas?” Bucky asked, scratching the back of his neck, trying to sound casual and missing the mark by what felt like a few hundred miles.

“Tomorrow’s Christmas. Should be open today.”

“Right,” Bucky said, pursing his lips and nodding down at the table. “Right. Sure.”

“Buck, you’re the one who said I needed to stick with it, every day, if I was gonna—”

Bucky snorted. “Need to shut my fat mouth.”

Steve's eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I just…” Bucky took a deep breath, tried to smile at Steve. “Don’t you wanna do something fun? We don’t have to see the tree. We can, I dunno, just go get an egg cream. Walk around in the snow ‘til we get cold. Hell, let’s go find some carolers and sing off-key at ‘em, I don’t care. Why not?”

“Didn’t know you had such an affinity for the holidays, is all,” Steve said, looking at Bucky like Bucky was telling some elaborate joke and he’d missed the punch line. “Dinner at your folks’ every year, sure, but you’ve never really,” he waved towards the window, “gone in for all that.”

And that, Bucky had to admit, was true. He loved Christmastime at his folks’: the girls in their fancy dresses, twirling and preening for Bucky; his Ma’s chocolate chip cookies, warm and sugar sweet; the candles and the Latin and the solemn, familiar ritual of high mass; dragging Steve along the past few years with only mild protest. But Christmas was a family affair for Bucky, not something he needed to celebrate with the masses. He never made a big deal of the wreaths and the bells, never insisted on going ice skating, never went out just to ogle at the lights. His gifts were thoughtful, practical, and never extravagant—last year he’d gotten Steve a pair of wool mittens and new laces for his boots.

But this year, he’d gotten Steve a canvas—blank, thirty by forty inches, and brand new. Billy Donohue had been on his way to the dumpster with it, sold it to Bucky for a song. _The wife’s movin’ back in with her folks when I ship out_ , Billy had said, _and there’s barely enough room for her, let alone her paintin’ stuff. You’re doing me a favor taking it off my hands, Barnes, you really are_. Still, the gift felt lavish, and Bucky had been giddy lugging it home under his arm, hiding it under his bed, felt only mildly silly tying a big red bow around it. Steve didn’t paint much anymore, his time now devoted entirely to hawking newspapers, sketch work for school, and the gym, but he’d always loved the broad sweeps of the brush, and Bucky wanted to make sure Steve remembered to do the things he loved, wanted to _keep_ reminding him, even after Bucky was—

“It’s Christmas in New York,” Bucky said. “People come from all over for this, don’t they? _This_ , right here in our backyard, and I’ve never even…” He swallowed. “Just wanna see what all the fuss is about, you know? Especially since it’s my last—”

Bucky clamped his mouth shut, but he could already see Steve seizing up with something between outrage and mild horror.

“What the hell does that mean?” Steve asked, his voice pitched low though his body seemed to vibrate with tension. “What do you mean, _last_?”

“Shit, Steve, I didn’t mean it like that.” Bucky winced and rubbed at his forehead. He’d been trying, desperately, not to think of anything as his _last_ , certainly had never said it out loud, but the word kept burrowing into his thoughts uninvited. _Wonder if this is the last_ , he’d think as he dug into a slice of apple pie from the diner down the block, or _might be the last time I_ as he waved up to Mrs. Coleman, sweeping the snow from her balcony, on his walk home from whatever site he’d been working. And he could try to rationalize it—Mrs. Coleman was old and wouldn’t be around much longer; the pie was bound to taste different two, three years from now, especially with the rationing—but that didn’t stop his brain from weighing down even the most mundane tasks with melancholy, though Bucky rejected the impulse with an intensity that gave him headaches.

He didn’t have a death wish. But there were certain things he couldn’t deny. This was his last Christmas in this apartment, with Steve searching for somewhere less expensive, nearer to school, to move into after Bucky shipped out. And this would be his last Christmas in Brooklyn, probably stateside, for a good, long while. Who could fault him for wanting to make that special? For wanting to spend as much time as possible with Steve, because this could be his _last_ —

“It’s not your last anything,” Steve said, pushing up from the table and grabbing his coat from the rack.

“Hey, hey, wait a second, where’re you going?” Bucky leapt up after Steve, caught his hand to stop him from moving towards the door.

“I told you where,” Steve said, pulling his hand from Bucky’s grip. “You don’t have to come, I know the drill.”

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky said. “I’m begging you here, okay, pal? We don’t have to do anything, go anywhere, we can just stay here. Forget the Christmas shit. Just _stay_ here. For me, huh? You put one less hour in on the bag, what’s it gonna hurt?”

“You wanna know why I’m going?”

"Christ, Steve, I don’t need to hear the damn speech again. Or hell, I can do it for you. _Everyone deserves the chance to serve their_ —”

“I’m going so I can follow your dumb ass overseas and prove to you, once and for all, what a massive idiot you are, thinking it’s your last anything. I have to…Buck, if I can’t…” Steve looked down at his shoes. “I have to go.”

“No, you don’t. You don’t because it’s not gonna do you any good.” Steve’s head jerked up, and he opened his mouth to say something, but Bucky didn’t let him get a word in. “Sure, I can teach you to take a punch, throw a punch, and maybe you’ll gain a few pounds of muscle and run a mile without keeling over, but they’re gonna take one look at your file and sing the same tune. One extra day at the gym won’t get rid of your asthma, your heart problems, won’t miraculously wipe away the days I spent running to your bedside, thinking this was the time you wouldn’t make it. Because that’s what it would take, Steve, to get you into the Army. A miracle.”

Steve bristled. “You don’t think I can do this.”

“Doesn't mean a damn thing, what I think. _They_ won’t let you, and that’s not gonna change. You can’t change that.”

Steve looked at Bucky like he was sizing him up, getting ready to deck him, before sighing, deflating, and shrugging into his coat. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’ll keep trying.”

He was gone before Bucky could think of anything else to say.

Bucky watched the door for a long moment before returning to the kitchen, finishing his lukewarm coffee without even trying to enjoy it. Determined to salvage something of the day, he got dressed, bundled himself up, and left the apartment with no real objective but to let the wind and the snow freeze his mind silent. He went down to the diner for a stack of pancakes, picked up a roast for dinner, wandered the streets listening for carolers and bells, sat in the park and watched a pack of shrieking kids start a snowball fight. He got home around sunset, feeling heavier than when he’d left, and Steve still wasn’t there.

Bucky put the meat in the icebox, pulled Steve’s canvas out from under his bed and leaned it up against the wall in the living room, though he was certain now that Steve wouldn’t want much to do with it. His gut felt sore, like he’d taken a fist to it. Everything he’d said to Steve was true, and he’d known how Steve would react—of course he had, he could set his watch by Steve. So why had he said it? To give Steve the truth, after lying to him for so many weeks? (If he’d learned anything in Sunday school, it was that a lie of omission was still a sin.) He didn’t feel like his intentions were as pure as simply coming clean. To goad him, then, into reacting the way Bucky expected (if not necessarily wanted)? Or just to knock some sense into Steve, to try his damndest to keep him home, to keep him _safe_?

Old habits always died hard.

Desperate to stop the useless pinwheeling of his thoughts, Bucky dropped down to the couch, curled up on his side and stared out the window, where the snow was just starting to let up. His eyes blurred against the backdrop of grey clouds, heavy eyelids fluttering and eventually falling shut.

When he opened them again, it was dark, save for the glow of a soft light coming from the corner of the room. Bucky blinked, squinted, rolled onto his back and tracked the shadows flickering across the ceiling until he woke enough to register the orange shimmer as candlelight.

“Hey. You awake?”

Steve was sitting on the floor beside the couch, elbow propped up on the cushions beside Bucky’s hip and chin resting on his fist. He smiled, softly, at Bucky.

“Hey. Yeah,” Bucky said, groggy. He scooted so his back was up against the arm rest, so he could get a better look at Steve without straining. “When’d you get back?”

“Little while ago,” Steve said, shrugging one shoulder. “Didn’t want to wake you. I put the roast in the oven. Should be ready in about an hour.”

“Thanks,” Bucky said, with a lilt of confusion. “Hey, Steve, listen, I—”

“I hope that canvas was for me,” Steve said.

“What? Yeah, course it was for you. What are you—”

“I made you something. And I know it’s not…it’s nothing like the real thing. I know that. But I thought maybe it would…it could…”

“Steve.”

“It could be something you remember, anyway, even though it’s not…what they all come for, exactly, it’s not—”

“Steve. _Stevie_ ,” Bucky said, chuckling a little. “I swear you never quit running that mouth. Would you spit it out, already?”

“Over there,” Steve said, nodding to the corner. “Merry Christmas.”

Bucky turned. The canvas was propped up against the wall, and painted on it, in Steve’s familiar brushstrokes, was a Christmas tree, dotted with red and blue pastel ornaments and little yellow lights, skyscrapers towering behind it. It was the Rockefeller tree, Bucky suddenly realized, his breath catching. There were small candles on the floor surrounding the canvas, on the windowsill behind it, resting precariously on top, probably fifteen in total, and Bucky felt like maybe his heart was about to beat right out of his chest, or stop beating altogether.

“Talked to a few guys down at the Y who saw the tree lighting,” Steve said, staring into the tiny flames. He had flecks of green paint on his chin, his hands. “Said they didn’t even light candles this year. Couldn’t blow ‘em out in time for a blackout, if there was an attack. So. At least we have that.”

“Where the hell did you get so many candles?” Bucky asked, his voice thick.

Steve smirked. “A guy’s gotta have some secrets.”

“You think maybe this is a fire hazard?”

“Oh, definitely. Get a good look, ‘cause the whole thing's about to go up.”

Bucky laughed. “Steve, this is—”

“Got about three punches in before I realized what an idiot I was,” Steve said, picking at the paint under his fingernails. “Came back and you weren’t here, thought maybe you’d gone to your folks’ early, and I saw the canvas and thought I could at least give you something to come home to. Had to go get some paints, mine were all dried out, and…listen, Buck, I know it’s not…it can’t compare, and they don’t take the tree down right away, so we can still go see it, if you want, and the painting, I know I’m a little rusty, and I can touch it up later, but for tonight—”

And Bucky surged forward and kissed Steve, without thinking, just needed to shut him up and tell him, _show_ him, how thankful he was. Because Bucky had never been good with words, stuttered and stumbled over his own tongue, but he could do _this_ , skim his gratitude across Steve’s cheek with his thumb, press it into Steve’s lips with his own. He’d never kissed Steve, not like this, never thought to _want_ to, didn’t want to make time with Steve or treat him like a dame, but it felt right anyway, a natural extension of his already easy way with Steve, the hands on his shoulders, arms around his neck, lips on his forehead. Why _shouldn’t_ Bucky kiss Steve, deny Steve an expression of affection he loved so much? Bucky wouldn’t deny Steve anything, if he could manage.

Why should Bucky hold back now, when this could be his last—

Steve blinked blearily at him as he pulled back, and Bucky felt his face starting to heat up, because while it all made sense in his head, Steve couldn't actually hear his thoughts, however much that seemed to be the case. “Uh,” Bucky said, coughed, started again. “I, uh, don’t want…I didn’t mean…sorry, I just wanted to say, uh, thank you?”

Mercifully, Steve burst into laughter. “Well. You’re _welcome,_ ” he said, and Bucky threw his head back and laughed, too, falling backward while Steve leaned forward and buried his face in his arm, both of them shaking with mirth.

Once they calmed, Bucky reached out and cupped the back of Steve’s neck and sighed. He hadn’t realized how little he’d been touching Steve, lately, how little Steve had _let_ him, caged up in his own head, behind his prickly defenses. He rubbed his thumb across the notches of Steve’s spine, smiled as Steve took a deep breath and started to unwind under his hand. Dark little corners inside Bucky—ones he hadn’t even noticed turning dull and blurry—were sparking back to life; Bucky could _feel_ it.

“I was an ass,” Steve said, muffled, his face nestled in the couch cushions.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Still mean it, though.” Steve lifted his head and regarded Bucky seriously. “This isn’t your last anything, Barnes. And I’m still coming with you.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, not entirely believing Steve on either count, but willing to let it slide. He could let Steve have this, let himself have this. It was Christmas. “Alright, get up here, punk, stop giving me those sad eyes. My day in the lap of luxury ain’t over yet.” He pushed himself upright, stretched his arm out along the back of the couch, and Steve curled into his side, slight and warm against his ribcage. Bucky closed his eyes and thought of nothing, easily.

“We’ll do Christmas right,” Steve said. “The tree, the lights. We’ll do it all, when you get back. When…when _we_ get back.”

“Nah,” Bucky said. “Saw the tree. Saw the lights.”

“I mean it.”

“Yeah, me too. Brooklyn did it better.”

“You’re such a sap.”

“Oh, _I’m_ a sap. The guy with the candles thinks _I’m_ a sap. That’s hilarious.”

“You _kissed_ me. How ‘bout we call it a draw?”

“Hmm.” Bucky was quiet for a moment. “Didn’t get to see the reindeer though. Would’ve liked to see the reindeer.”

Steve laughed. “Next time.”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, pulling Steve closer. “Next time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like most of my pre-TFA stuff, this is based loosely on the TFA prequel comic. Take that with a hearty dose of LOL CONTINUITY though, I only grab what I want. If Marvel can get away with it, so can I. And if you want a little bit more in-depth look at how I ship Steve and Bucky (it's...complicated), I wrote about it [on Tumblr](http://cheesethesecond.tumblr.com/post/143355251793/so-i-have-question-for-you-and-im-really-sorry)!


	4. Anchor (1)

Bucky was watching the sunrise in the south of France, and he hadn’t slept in six days.

At least, he thought they were in the south of France. It was hard to be sure; he wasn’t one for taking in the sights on their endless parade between HYDRA bases, and Falsworth had control of the maps. Navigating wasn’t Bucky’s job, anyway. His job was to get wherever they were going and disappear, watch through a scope and wait and wait and wait and _wait_ , wait until the world tunneled down to the target in his sights, until he pulled the trigger and was left with only himself, his deep breaths and the rest of the world gone silent.

There were times when he didn’t get to pull the trigger, when there was no target, or the target had already been eliminated, when Bucky broke down his rifle and told himself he was glad, relieved from the responsibility of taking another life. It didn’t change the way his fingers twitched, or his heartbeat drummed on in his ears, though he’d been told to stand down. The way his skin itched and craved the stillness that only came after the shot.

He craved that stillness even now, a week since their last mission. Phillips had gotten word of enemy troop movement that could spell a fairly significant victory if they played their cards right, set an ambush for a precise moment, and they’d been instructed to hole up in a nearby abandoned village and wait for that moment. Most of the men were giddy with the opportunity to press pause on the war, but Bucky shrugged off invitations to poker games and shared swigs of something acrid and vile that bit at the back of his tongue. Dugan and Jones and their wisecracking had been a godsend in the trenches at Azzano, in the cages, and after. On the long march back, after he'd stumbled deliriously from Zola's table, the ragtag bunch of them had helped Bucky hold onto the last outcropping of his sanity.

But now, the company chafed. His smile ached with insincerity, and the liquor did nothing but burn his throat and make Steve stare at him with morose eyes, follow close behind whenever Bucky pretended to stagger to his bedroll.

“Never took you for a sad drunk,” Steve had said once with a weary half-smile, tugging absently at the canvas around Bucky’s shoulders, dangerously close to tucking him in.

“Just full of surprises, the pair of us,” Bucky murmured in return, waving at Steve’s newly-muscled chest.

Everyone started going a little stir-crazy after a few days, bickering, implementing a series of pranks that escalated until Morita ended up naked in a nearby pond, Dugan lost an eyebrow, and the only boots Steve could find were those from his USO tour, useless and candy-apple red. Bucky was riled as ever, anxious for action, and it was only after the third day he realized he hadn’t strung two consecutive hours of unconsciousness together since they’d made camp. He tossed and turned most nights, went on long walks around the perimeter, occasionally closed his eyes and drifted to the lull of the others’ conversations but never slipped under for very long. He wondered how he was still upright, and then, he wondered how far he could push it. How long he could go without.

There were certain things Bucky hadn’t been able to ignore since his rescue, a laundry list of ways his body no longer felt like his own: how quickly bruises healed, blossoming in spectacular purples and yellows before vanishing twice as fast; the yawning pit in his stomach that was never fully quelled, no matter how much he ate (and he’d learned, after the gnawing forced him to double over and heave bile into the dirt more than once, to eat little bits over the course of the day, so he was always hungry but never starving); the way alcohol heavied his limbs but did nothing to numb the rest of him with blessed incoherence. He didn’t know why that was such a sticking point, except that he’d always been a lightweight, a fact that mortified him until he learned the benefits of being a cheap drunk: namely, that it was cheap, and fun to get an easy buzz on.

Cheap to drown his sorrows, too, if the occasion called.

There was nothing to do about it, though, here in this godforsaken European countryside, running with a group of lunatics trying to win a war on sheer bluster and dumb luck. After his debriefing in London, he’d been half out of his mind, disoriented and recoiling from how wrong he felt, how _off_. Recoiling from Steve, only to reach desperately for him again, letting him make promises he couldn’t promise and remind Bucky of things long gone. But here, Bucky had to focus, keep them safe, deliver them home. So he ignored what he could, and what he couldn’t, he let simmer, let his blood boil for the things Zola had stolen. Strapped down to a table, he’d begged silently for someone to find him, until he’d started begging— _screaming_  —to be left alone. He was still begging for it, couldn’t stop now, couldn’t remember how to want anything but solitude, away from hovering bodies and sharp tools. Isolation was a foreign desire, and it infuriated Bucky, this new want that was not his own. He let that fury fuel him, channeled it into combat, because at least that was useful.

But there was no need for fury when there was no mission, and there was nothing else to do, and he needed to _know_ , to test it, to see for himself how much had changed.

In the cool pre-dawn of his sixth day without sleep, Bucky had dragged himself to this hillside a few miles from camp to watch the sun rise over a mist-shrouded valley. His eyes were sore, and voices grated at him like metal on metal—he swore he could feel sparks in his teeth—but he was lucid, and he’d gotten there on his own. He sat and pulled his legs to his chest, propped his chin on his knees and blinked slowly, a steady tremor running through him at the chill. It was quiet and calm and beautiful, and Bucky closed his eyes and thought maybe it was time to get some rest. Maybe enough was enough.

“Thought I might find you here.”

Bucky jumped; he’d already started to nod off. “Bullshit,” he said, rubbing his eyes, surprised at how wrecked his own voice sounded. “You didn't have a clue where I was.”

Steve laughed. “Gimme some credit. I’ve only been searching for two hours.”

“Yeah, you always were shit at hide-and-seek.”

“Hey.”

“I remember finding you in that alley behind the butcher’s, must’ve been an hour after sunset. Refused to quit playing ‘til you found me. Scared your mom half to death. Didn’t realize I’d just been following you around all afternoon. Just a few steps behind.”

“I believe that’s called cheating,” Steve said, nudging Bucky in the side with his toe. “Why throw in the towel just ‘cause you don’t know how to play?”

“'S not cheating. Just wanted you in my sights.”

Steve lowered himself next to Bucky, near but not touching. He moved differently in his new body, Bucky had noticed. At 90 pounds, Steve was a whirlwind of ferocity, occupying space with his oversized attitude to make up for his lack of physical presence. He wore the chip on his shoulder with the bravado of a man three times his size. And even now, in battle, Steve lashed out with endless stores from the same well of pent-up energy, ran his mouth like he still needed to fight for attention. But in the quiet moments, he moved like a man acutely aware of his own power. He walked lightly, spoke softly, eased himself into spaces with a sort of fluid, silent grace that felt, if not entirely natural, then at least practiced. He had not eliminated his sharp edges, but had smoothed them out voluntarily. He held himself as if he knew the damage he could inflict, controlled and so very careful. Bucky felt a surge of affection for it, for his Steve, whose thorns grew over a bed of tenderness, who had gentled entirely by choice.

“Enjoying the sunrise?” Steve asked. Bucky knew what Steve really wanted to ask, what he wasn’t allowed to ask, not after London, where he’d asked mindlessly, incessantly, and Bucky had pleaded with him to stop. He couldn’t bring himself to answer anymore, to tell Steve something neither of them wanted to hear. So Steve stopped asking _Are you alright?_ and started asking _You need an extra ration? Want me to take first watch? Can I take a look at that shoulder? Get a chance to dry your boots out?_

Bucky didn’t have the heart to call him on it.

“Sunrise is the sunrise wherever,” he said. The fog was starting to dissolve, and he could feel the heat on his face, the light pulsing against his eyelids. “Just trying to get warm.”

“Aw, c’mon,” Steve said, with a forced levity that made Bucky wince. “Watching the sunrise in France? That’s gotta be something to write home about.”

“This ain’t Paris, pal. Not like we’re sipping champagne by the Eiffel Tower. We’re up to our asses in muck and mortar fire, and the sun rising just means we get another day of it.”

Steve was quiet for a moment. “Guess I’d rather be watching it in Brooklyn.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Bucky.”

Bucky peeled his eyes open at the change in Steve’s tone, the thin thread of desperation laced throughout. “What?”

“You just…” Steve took a deep breath, held it for a second with his mouth open and his head tilted, before sighing. “You look tired, Buck.”

Bucky snorted. “Eagle eye, Cap. Nothing gets past you.”

“I mean it,” Steve said, clenching his teeth against the question he was struggling not to ask. He settled for, “I’m worried about you.”

“Watch it.”

“Never seen you spend this much time alone. Never seen you _want_ to.”

Bucky stiffened. “A few things’ve changed, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Leave it, Steve. Maybe I just don’t have a lot to say.”

Steve shifted to face Bucky fully, so Bucky continued squinting out into the valley, resolute and still. “Heard you rolling around last night. You’re beat, Buck. Whatever you’re carrying, let me help so you can—”

“You can’t. It’s not yours to carry.”

Steve groaned in frustration, scratched his hands through his hair, and Bucky couldn’t stop the semi-hysterical laugh that bubbled out of him, couldn’t help being caught off guard whenever Brooklyn Steve’s mannerisms manifested in Captain America’s body. He wiped his fingers over his mouth, tried to pull himself back together, but Steve was already frowning at him. “Alright, maybe I could do with a little more shut-eye. Didn’t sleep so hot last night. Or the night before. Or the night before.” He had to bite his lip to keep from laughing again, though he knew, objectively, that what he was saying wasn't funny.

Steve’s brow furrowed. “When’s the last time you slept?”

Bucky shrugged. He suddenly couldn’t remember, though he was sure he’d known just minutes earlier. Had it been six days? Seven? Had he slept at all since Steve pulled him from the fire? “Couldn’t for a few days and then I just…didn’t.”

“Didn’t?”

“Wasn’t hard. Couldn’t get more than an hour, anyway, so I just stopped.”

For a few moments, Bucky didn’t hear anything but the birds waking in the trees behind them, and Steve’s heavy, messy breathing as he tried to keep calm. Bucky knew that sound, felt like maybe he’d been born knowing it. It meant Steve was mad, seething raging mad, and it was oddly soothing. Bucky smiled.

“Why?” Steve finally asked, his face decisively blank, grasping for a modicum of composure Bucky knew he didn’t really have.

“Because I could.”

Steve dropped his chin, shook his head at the ground. “No. No, that’s not good enough. That’s not even…Bucky, you can’t just…you _can’t_.”

“But I _can_ ,” Bucky said, barely a whisper.

“That doesn’t mean you…what if we’d gotten our orders from Phillips? What would you have done? Grabbed your rifle and marched out there half-conscious? Do you realize how dangerous that would’ve been? You could’ve gotten yourself _killed_. You could’ve gotten the men—”

“ _No_ ,” Bucky snapped, abruptly wide awake, slamming his fist into the ground. His head was spinning. He rounded on Steve, felt like he was blazing, and Steve reeled back just enough for Bucky to think maybe he was. “I would never, I would fucking _never_. We have a goddamn timetable. We have _days_. You think I would do _anything_ to put you in danger?”

“Bucky.”

“You gonna ride the rest of ‘em for being drunk off their asses for six days? Huh, _Captain_? Gonna take your self-righteousness over there and lecture Dugan about being skunked on moonshine and waving his shotgun around?”

Steve’s eyes flashed with hurt. “Bucky, I’m—”

“That was a fucking low blow, Rogers. I know what I’m doing. I have it under control. I have it under control. I…” Except the pressure in Bucky’s chest had built to a maximum, and his eyes were rapidly filling with tears, his throat tightening, his breath coming in ragged pants. Maybe he was more exhausted than he’d realized.

“Hey,” Steve said as Bucky shook his head, blinking over and over again. “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He reached out, his hand hovering over Bucky’s shoulder before he lowered his fingers to rub circles on Bucky’s arm. Bucky’s whole body tensed, his nerves alight at the contact. He’d been shying from Steve’s touch since London, too raw and overstimulated—even the brush of his shirt against his skin felt like sandpaper. He couldn’t stand the thought of his body rejecting the comfort he’d always found in Steve, and stayed well outside Steve’s reach. This was one thing he hadn’t been willing to test, couldn’t add another fissure to his heart, already so close to shattering. 

But Steve’s touch felt just as it always had, unremarkable in its familiarity, ingrained, as if it were his own. Bucky sobbed.

“C’mere,” Steve said, though he didn’t tug at Bucky, didn’t force him to his side. Bucky went all the more willingly, curled into Steve, buried his face in Steve’s shoulder and felt Steve’s arms settle awkwardly around his back. It was clear Steve wasn’t used to holding, just as Bucky wasn’t used to being held, but his earnest fumbling was endearing, the reversal yanking another sob from Bucky's chest. “Hey. Shhh. We’re gonna get you some sleep. Get you somewhere quiet and warm, and you can stay there as long as you want, okay?”

Bucky nodded, burying one hand in Steve’s shirt and bringing the other up to grab at the tags around his neck. “Had a nightmare,” he remembered, shuddering as Steve’s hand made a broad sweep up and down his spine. “After the last mission. 'S why I couldn’t sleep, at first.”

Steve answered with a lingering kiss to his temple.

“Got blasted by one of those HYDRA weapons. Shot of blue and _poof_. You’re just gone. Nothing. Not even your boots. Not even your tags.” He shivered again. “Don’t think I can sleep until…” He pulled back, tugged his tags over his head and pressed them into Steve’s chest. “You gotta take these.”

“No way, Buck, you can’t go without…” Steve held his hand out anyway, and Bucky dropped the tags into his palm.

“Won’t matter if there’s no body,” Bucky said, and Steve flinched, curling his fingers around the tags instinctively. “They blast me, and there’s nothing left. Even if I’m not…I gotta have something to send back. Piece of me in an envelope still means I was here. I gotta exist, Steve.”

Steve made a soft sound like he was being strangled. “Okay,” he said, hauling Bucky back to him and hiding his face in Bucky’s hair. “Okay. Okay. But I can’t…I won’t give you mine.”

Bucky huffed. “Wasn’t fishing for a trade.”

Steve’s arms tightened. “The wrong people find you with my tags around your neck and…the things they might do…” Bucky’s eyes prickled again. He hadn’t realized the depths of Steve’s fears, the horrors he saw behind his own eyelids and the price he was already paying in his imagination. The true weight of being Captain America, and how he was teetering beneath it.

“Stevie,” Bucky said, rubbing his nose against Steve’s collarbone, basking in the urge to comfort, to be able to soothe again. He felt grounded for the first time in months, tethered to the world, to his body and a life that resembled, even tenuously, the one he’d lived in Brooklyn. Here was the punk who’d held his hand when he was a terrified kid, who’d lit him a roomful of candles when he was a terrified adult. He had to do something. He _could_ do something. “You know what? You know how I know you’re gonna be fine?”

“How’s that?”

“Your life line.” Bucky grabbed Steve’s hand, pried open the fingers still clenched around his tags and brushed his own under the cool metal, over the crease in Steve’s palm. “Remember what I told you? You’re gonna live forever.”

Steve’s laugh was wet, but genuine. “You honestly know anything about palm reading?”

“Not a thing,” Bucky said, and Steve laughed again. He felt dizzy, buzzing and incoherent with lightness. “Doesn’t mean nothing. I was a smart kid. Knew shit. Still do. Trust me.”

“You’re not making sense,” Steve said, resting his forehead against Bucky’s.

“Yeah, okay.” Bucky's grasp on consciousness was starting to slacken. He sighed, his eyes fluttering shut. “Not gonna make it back, don’t think. I’m just…tired.”

“That’s fine,” Steve said, tucking himself around Bucky once more. “It’s fine. Close your eyes. Get some sleep.”

Bucky did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of my WWII Bucky characterization is pulled directly from my other post-Zola Bucky fic, which is like, my manifesto of all things WWII-era Bucky Barnes. If you're interested in getting more into Bucky's head during this time, you can read it [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2520161).


	5. (0)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's what I would call a (sort of; brief) suicide mention in this, which I know are a trigger for many people, even if it's sort of...complicated here, so if you're feeling iffy about it scroll to the bottom, and I'll give you a quick rundown of what you're in for before you dive in!

Bucky lets Steve Rogers find him at eleven p.m. on a Sunday, sitting on a bench in Prospect Park, ten months and sixteen days after he dragged Steve out of the Potomac.

They’re secluded, for the most part, set a few yards back from the path and the streetlamps and not a soul in sight, just as Bucky intended. He’d scouted this spot for a week before he was satisfied with it, texted Steve his coordinates and a message: _I know you’re shit at hide n seek, pal, but this is ridiculous_. Vague enough to ease his paranoia—he’d dumped the phone after—but undoubtedly familiar, words he knew, a memory at its most primitive—an echo without a narrative, no _where_ , no _when_. It barely matters; Bucky’s learned that even half-formed memories have use.

The air is summertime humid and buzzing with insect sounds, and Steve's approaching slowly, held tense and telegraphing his movements so as not to spook Bucky, as if Bucky could possibly not see him, _feel_ him there, as if some shapeless loyalty to Steve hadn’t pulled him all the way back to Brooklyn in the first place. As if anything should spook Bucky, a permanent soldier down to his very cells.

And yet.

Steve sits beside Bucky and stares pointedly ahead, folds his hands in his lap and swallows every couple of seconds like he’s trying not to choke on his own anticipation. Bucky’s not spooked, but he’s…something. Something like fear, but not, because fear has a taste, thick and metallic, and this doesn’t bite, just trembles under his skin, ripples outward from his core, full-body warm. He wants to chew on a fingernail, bounce his knee. He doesn’t, but he _wants_ to.

“Nervous,” Bucky whispers. That’s it. He’s _nervous_. It’s hard to process, the way his body feels and reacts outside the numbness of mission parameters and the flush of fight-or-flight before the tank, the chair. Harder, still, to assign that rush of feeling to one of a hundred-thousand moving pictures that flicker behind his eyes, spotty and faded as an old film reel. He can align them, sometimes, if he tries, superimpose an emotion over a collection of words and images and produce something resembling an honest-to-god memory, but…it’s hard. It’s work.

Steve Rogers is worth the work.

Bucky closes his eyes and digs in. Nervous is:

_a baby crying in the other room, and a whispered discussion behind closed doors._

_the clank clank clank up the first hill on the Cyclone._

_one last look in the mirror to straighten his tie, smooth his hair._

_a doctor’s indecisive hum, and the second press of a stethoscope to a thin chest._

_the gentle swaying of a train two hours out from Camp McCoy._

Tomorrow, nervous might be something else, or nothing at all, but today nervous is all these things and more, pulsing at the membrane of Bucky’s consciousness. He takes a deep breath and tries not to get overwhelmed, inches out of his head one sense at a time, the way he’s taught himself to do: The tree beside them smells ancient and musty. The bench is damp beneath his flesh-and-blood hand and warped slightly from past rainfalls. The crickets are screaming, and his heart is _pounding_.

Steve laughs under his breath. “Guess I am too,” he says, rubbing at the back of his neck and turning to Bucky with bright eyes. “But it’s…it’s really good to see you, Buck.”

Bucky nods. He doesn’t have to work for this one: Good is the way Steve Rogers is looking at him right now, nothing more, nothing less.

“You being followed?”

“Not since I hit the states.” He’s been a ghost for more years than he hasn’t; he knows how to lose a tail, how to shroud himself in the rumors of his own demise. And he's seen the news reports: though the world hasn't forgotten the Soldier, they don't think often of Bucky Barnes. It won’t last forever—SHIELD will find him, or HYDRA, or some civilian with a camera and a hero complex—but he's bought them some time. “You?”

Steve shakes his head. “Are you…” he clears his throat, “just passing through, or?”

“No,” Bucky says. “I’m here. I’m done.”

Steve cocks an eyebrow. “With?”

He shrugs, because he won’t tell Steve about the past ten months, the nights he spent sweating and screaming through desperate cravings for a drug to sedate him, a nameless poison that existed only in a circle of HYDRA doctors long dead by his own hand; the days he spent relearning himself in every possible way, from the bombardment of recollections that left him feeling out-of-body to his slow, gut-wrenching reintroduction to solid foods; the mornings he woke with blood on his hands and no idea of how it got there. He won’t tell Steve about his own mission, the list of those he killed in the name of atonement, and those he killed for retribution alone, the shame of being always too late, never enough. The shame of returning to Steve, now, with the job unfinished, so many roaches still scuttling free, because he decided he was human enough to be tired, to want quiet and security, as if he had any right to it.

“But you’re staying?”

“Let you find me, didn’t I?” Bucky says, but the inflection’s not right. He tries again, aims for sincere instead of teasing; he hasn’t had much practice with teasing. “I…wanted you in my sights.”

Steve lights up. “Cheater,” he says, as playful as Bucky had wanted to be. His hand shifts, so slightly, in Bucky’s direction, and suddenly Bucky finds himself thrown to the other side of the bench, clinging to the armrest, seconds from bolting. Steve’s hand freezes, and he tries to keep his face blank, but Bucky’s spent a lifetime reading tells, studying the way emotion paints the face, the meaning of a twitch, a tick, and how best to counter it. Steve is an open book: his disappointment lives in the downward curve of his lips and the weighty slump of his shoulders. His heart is at home in the well-worn creases around his eyes.

“I don’t want you to touch me,” Bucky says between gritted teeth. “You can’t touch me.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Steve says, hands up by his face. Bucky’s tingle of anxiety ramps up into something more substantial that snags in his chest, and the memories come unbidden.

Terror is:

_a skyrocketing fever in the dead of winter._

_32557028._

_the muffled buzz of a saw._

_a needle prick, and fire in his blood._

_electricity crackling._

_the snap of a cheekbone._

_glass shattering._

_falling._

“Bucky.” Steve sounds syrup-thick, and miles away. “Hey, Bucky. Bucky. It’s alright. I won’t, I’m sorry. I won’t. I promise.”

When Bucky’s vision stops tunneling, he’s lost a few minutes, at least. It’s not the first time, certainly not the longest, but it still leaves him feeling flattened out, dimmed into irrelevance. Steve is slumped over with his head in his hands, pressed as far from Bucky as he can get.

“I should go,” Bucky murmurs. Steve would never lay a hand on him with any intent to harm. He _knows_ this, even if he can’t remember it, can’t summon a single piece of evidence to prove it, no matter how deep he reaches. What he remembers, instead, is that for the Soldier, kind fingers were always incidental, and being held was only a prelude to being held down.

“No,” Steve says, balling his hands into fists against his forehead. “Don’t, Buck, please, I’m begging you. I won’t touch you, won’t do anything you don’t want. You make the rules. Just…stay. Stay with me. Don’t leave again.” His voice is so reedy with desperation that Bucky winces. It’s been a long year, he realizes, for the both of them.

“You live in a tower,” he says. “I can’t stay there.” He hadn’t wanted to be so contrary, had planned on doing whatever Steve asked, but fear makes the word _no_ come easier, goads him into refusing things just because he can. And right now, the only thing that sounds worse than living in a glass box high above the city is living in a glass box full of strangers high above the city.

“We don’t have to.” Steve nearly trips over the words. “Bad idea, anyway, we should ease everyone into…” He takes a breath. “We’ll go somewhere else, alright?”

“Where?”

“Sam’s. He’s a friend who’s been—”

“No.”

“Okay. Okay. Just…give me a day, I’ll figure something out. Can you do that?”

Bucky nods.

“Where will you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“You don’t have to sleep outside.”

“There are worse things,” Bucky says, dreamy and distant, his body coming down, going loose as the adrenaline drains. “Can see the stars. Like the old days.”

He doesn’t really know what old days he’s talking about outside hazy flashes of a rooftop, a peek through a forest's canopy, but it sounds convincing enough. Steve’s lips quirk anyway, and he stares like he’s trying to commit Bucky to memory, just in case. “I hear it’s gonna storm.”

“Like I said, there are worse things. Quit stalling.”

Steve’s smile falters. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a cell phone and offers it to Bucky. “Here. If you need anything, call Sam. I’ll answer.”

Bucky takes the phone with his metal hand, and doesn’t miss the way Steve’s gaze lingers. He forgets about the arm, sometimes, so familiar with the dull ache under his shoulder and the steady whirring and shifting of the plates. He drags his other hand over the screen and the phone lights up under his fingers.

“See you tomorrow night?” Steve asks, burying his hands in his pockets. He shifts from foot to foot, wanting so clearly to reach for Bucky, and Bucky wishes he could let him. Wishes he could imagine Steve’s touch as anything but a sharp knife to an exposed nerve, his arms as anything but a cage. But his terror is illogical, instinctive. It kept him alive for seventy years, when he should be dead. “Same time, same place?”

“Okay.”

“You promise?”

“Trust me, Steve,” Bucky says, because he knows Steve will. Steve trusted the Soldier, whose confidence was lethal, who knew how to take advantage of Steve and his trust without understanding how precious either was.

He watches Steve go, musters up a smile when Steve glances back over his shoulder, and stretches out on the bench when he rounds the corner, out of sight. Bucky folds his hands over his stomach and waits for sleep to come. It doesn’t.

After an hour or so, he gets up and walks further into the park, kicking at rocks and sticks littering the pathway and listening to the rustle of leaves as the wind starts to pick up. Steve was right about the storm. His shoulder is already stiffening, but the cooling air feels good on his flushed face, and he is calm. He closes his eyes, and

 

when he opens them again, he’s sweating, soaked through and shoved into the narrow space between the front seat of a car and the back with his knees pulled up to his chest. Something is vibrating, faintly, against his leg. He wriggles and pushes himself up to look out the window. It’s afternoon. He’s parked at a gas station just off the highway, pulled around to the side of the lot, out of the way. The windows are cracked open. The keys are dangling from the ignition.

“No, no, no, no,” he mutters, scrambling over the center console and into the driver’s seat, searching frantically for some clue as to where, or when, he is. It’s not Brooklyn. It’s not Monday morning, just past midnight, like it’s supposed to be. When he turns the key, the car doesn’t start. Out of gas. He checks the glove compartment—empty—and slams his metal hand against the steering wheel, which contorts into an impossible shape. “ _No!_ ” His chest heaves, and his eyes prickle with tears. It’s been months since he lost this sort of time—three months, to be precise, he remembers _exactly_ —

His pocket buzzes again, and he fumbles Steve’s cell phone out with shaking fingers. He has a new voicemail. He has 50 voicemails. He has 212 missed calls.

He doesn’t bother listening to the messages, just swipes at Sam Wilson’s name on the screen and presses the phone close to his ear, clears his throat, rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Bucky?” Steve answers, like the air rushing out of a tire.

“ _Steve_ ,” Bucky keens, crumpling forward and bumping his forehead on the broken steering wheel.

“Bucky, where—”

“I’m sorry,” he sobs. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, hey, no. Calm down. It’s alright.”

Bucky shoves the back of his hand into his mouth and bites at the metal until his teeth ache, until his tongue is coated with the taste of it. “I don’t remember…I didn’t mean to—”

“Shhh. Take a breath. Tell me what’s going on.”

“How long’s it been?”

A pause. “Almost three days.”

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. “Shit. Shit. Steve, I…fuck, I would’ve never…I would’ve _never_ come back if I had…if I knew…I thought this was _over_ , it hasn’t happened in…”

“Listen. Where are you? Can you figure out where you are?”

Bucky stumbles out of the car, hunches in on himself and wraps his metal arm around his stomach to keep it out of sight. He checks the license plate of a car pulling out of the station. “Maryland,” he croaks. “I think.” He jogs to the edge of the property and squints at a sign a little down the highway; his mouth dries out. “30 miles outside DC.”

“Can you get back here?”

“No gas. Broke the steering wheel.”

Steve starts muttering to someone else, and Bucky hurries back to the car, locks himself in and bangs his head back against the headrest.

“Okay. Sam and I are leaving now, we should be there in around…four hours.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t…” Bucky scoots down in his seat. It wasn’t right to drag this damage to Steve’s door. “I should just—”

“Four hours, Buck. Can you wait for me?”

“I can try.” He won’t promise again, not when his word means so little.

Steve hangs up, and Bucky closes his eyes. He won’t let himself sleep, so he takes stock of what he knows: he has a car. Stolen, most likely, but how? At gunpoint? The windows are still intact, no shattered glass. No gun, no blood, but that doesn’t mean anything; he could’ve stashed the gun, washed away the blood in any gas station along the way. Did anyone follow him? Are they watching him now? He wonders how long he’s been on the road. On his way to DC. Back to HYDRA? To Pierce? Pierce is dead, but maybe the Soldier (because he refuses to think of himself in the blank hours as _Bucky_ , he just _can’t_ ) doesn’t know that. Can Bucky even be sure of it? He’s never seen a body. Has Steve? Is it possible that—

Bucky swallows, dizzy. His emotions are a cyclone, fragments of feeling spinning so quickly, buzzing past his attempts to label and catalogue. He’s trying too hard to pin something down, _anything,_ to make sense of the infuriating blackness where three days of memories should be. A sharp pain burrows between his eyes, into his skull, and he whines, slumps lower and starts humming, not a tune, just a monotone meant to stabilize.

Panic is:

He takes a few shallow gulps of air.

Panic is:

His pulse is too fast. His chest is too tight.

Panic is:

He shuts down.

He doesn’t lose time, but he doesn’t notice it passing. People come and go. The sun sinks lower in the sky. Florescent lights flicker on above him. A car pulls up next to his.

Bucky watches, indifferent, as Steve and Sam approach. They open the door and move to help him out, and something flares up, briefly, in warning. “Don’t touch me,” he says.

Steve talks, and Bucky ignores him, shuffles past them to the car. He climbs into the backseat and wraps himself in a waiting blanket. Words are exchanged that he doesn’t hear. He rests his head against the window and starts humming again.

Steve frowns at him over the seatback. “Feeling okay?

Bucky doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t feel like anything.

*

He wakes up on a mattress in the center of a partially furnished living room. Sam’s on the floor to his left, legs kicked out and crossed at the ankles, and Steve is nowhere in sight.

“Hey,” Sam says, closing his book and setting it aside. “You alright?”

“How long?” Bucky curls up tight and braces for the answer.

“About twelve hours, is all.” Sam pitches his voice low, rhythmic and soothing, and Bucky appreciates the gesture, though it doesn’t help much. “You were conked out all the way here, and Steve didn’t wanna wake you.”

He tries not to shudder with the realization that someone carried him inside. “Where is Steve?”

“Bedroom. He wasn’t sleeping for shit on the couch.”

“Where is _here_?” Bucky sits up and surveys the room: high ceilings, big windows, blank walls. Two exits: a sliding door onto a second-story balcony, and a front door just beyond the kitchen. Five boxes stacked in the corner. A worn, leather couch with a faded pillow pushed up against the armrest. “Your place?”

“Nah, man, this is _your_ place.”

Bucky blinks. “Come again?”

“Steve said you needed somewhere that wasn’t, you know. Peopled. So he went and got one.”

“In three days?”

Sam smiles, more to himself than to Bucky. “Folks in Brooklyn are pretty eager to help their own, especially when their own is Captain America.”

“I was just _gone_ ,” Bucky scowls. “He shouldn’t have…he couldn’t have known I’d be back.”

“He was looking for a place anyway.” Sam shrugs. “And he’s Steve. He gets something in his head, and does what he wants.”

His words betray a weariness that Bucky doesn’t know how to fix, not when he’s so raw, barely stitched back together. To access the apologies within him would be to rip himself open anew. He would fester. He would bleed out.

“So, this whole ‘blackout and disappear’ thing,” Sam says, forced casual, waving his book at Bucky’s head. “Happen often?”

“Not often.”

“But sometimes.”

“Obviously.”

“You know why?”

“'Cause I'm fucked up?”

“You think maybe when you’re stressed, or—”

“I’m stressed all the time,” Bucky snaps. “I manage to stay conscious for most of it.”

“Alright, you don’t gotta get pissy with me. Just trying to help.”

“Don’t. You’re not.”

Sam glares at him. “You do realize I just drove Steve’s ass across three states to pick you up.” He gives Bucky a moment to respond; when Bucky doesn’t, he continues. “You _do_ realize I just drove Steve’s ass all over this country for _ten months_ looking for you.”

“I know. I was watching you.”

“Yeah, okay, _that’s_ creepy.”

Bucky sighs. “I didn’t think it would keep happening,” he says, softly, to his knees. “I wouldn’t have…wouldn’t be here, if I had known. I wouldn’t…hurt him. Like that. Like…anything.”

Sam presses his mouth into a tight line, and Bucky can tell there’s something he wants to say, but won’t. “Well, you’re here now. You planning on leaving again?”

“I didn’t _plan_ on leaving this time.” The spark of annoyance catches Bucky off guard. It’s petty, surface-level, a faint stinging in the back of his mind that he could swat away if he wanted. He doesn’t. He wants to bask in it, ignore the impulse to match the emotion with some distant reminiscence, some irritation from 1945 informing him how to feel. He smiles, ruining whatever illusion of genuine displeasure he’d managed to create.

Sam squints at him, clearly perplexed by the disconnect between Bucky’s tone and whatever’s happening on his face, and shakes his head. “Alright. Whatever. Just…get some more sleep. You got a brain to heal.”

When Bucky lies back down, he’s still grinning. It’s not the right emotion for the moment, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Thanks, Sam,” he says, pulling the blanket up to his chin. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Sam laughs. “Okay, weirdo. Nice to meet you, too.”

*

They all shoot for something resembling normalcy.

Steve brings the rest of his stuff over in increments, insists on taking the mattress in the living room and giving Bucky the bedroom, even though Bucky claims that the couch suits him just fine. He’d sleep on the floor, if it meant being closer to Steve. Their first night fully moved-in, Bucky doesn’t sleep at all, mesmerized by the slow circling of the ceiling fan and the distant rustling of Steve shifting in his sleep. At four a.m., he gives up, buries himself in a hoodie, grabs Steve’s keys and wallet and wanders a few blocks to the nearest corner store. He buys a cartload of breakfast food and wakes Steve with the smell of pancakes cooking and bacon frying.

“What’s this?” Steve asks, shuffling into the kitchen and rubbing a sleepy hand over his stomach.

“Pancakes,” Bucky says, flipping one with a flourish. “You like pancakes? Or…shit, I think _I_ like pancakes. I remember…wanting to make some, and you didn’t want ‘em. Shit, sorry, I’ll—”

“Bucky, it’s fine,” Steve laughs. “I love pancakes. Just didn’t know we had any.”

“We didn’t. I went shopping.”

“You…went out?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

“Of course it’s okay. Whatever you want.” Steve sits at the table and scratches a hand through his hair. “Didn’t realize you were ready to…” He nods at the window.

“What, see the world? Been there, done that, pal. Managed not to starve to death.”

“Buck.”

“What’d you think, I just sat in a hole for ten months twiddling my thumbs?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, quietly. “You haven’t told me.”

“I’m not broken, Steve,” Bucky says, a little sharp, though he wishes he could take it back as soon as the words leave his mouth. He doesn’t like lying to Steve, but he doesn’t want Steve treating him like a bomb to diffuse, however true it may be. “Even HYDRA let me do big boy things, all by my lonesome.” That’s not true, either—he always had a handler, went rogue only once and didn’t get very far—but the words roll easy off his tongue; he knows just what to say, how to channel the resonance of a past life.

“Sorry,” Steve says, so Bucky hands him a plate of pancakes. “This isn’t exactly charted territory. You’re gonna have to help me out. If I’m saying…or doing something…or if I’m not…” He frowns down at his food.

“Hey,” Bucky says, grinning, because Steve is asking him for help. Steve _needs_ him; he won’t take that for granted. “I got this one. Turns out I’ve had some practice with a dumb punk sticking his foot in his mouth.”

"Jerk." Steve tosses his fork at Bucky, and laughs, impressed, when Bucky snatches it in mid-air with his metal hand.

The next morning, after another near-sleepless night, Steve and Sam take Bucky running, careful to stay out of the main parks and off the main paths for fear of being recognized. It takes Bucky a while to quit looking over his shoulder, but a few miles in he’s exhausted, exhilarated, the most comfortable he’s felt in his skin in decades. His body burns, and it makes him feel thawed out, reanimated. He _laughs_ , and Steve laughs with him. They can’t stop beaming at each other.

That night, Bucky goes to bed happy. He falls asleep hard, and

 

as soon as he opens his eyes, he knows what’s happened. The blinds are pulled shut, the room dark and cool, but Bucky can see sunlight framing the window. Steve’s in a chair by the bed, head tipped back and arms folded over his chest. His eyes are closed, but he’s awake, judging from the worried crease in his forehead, and Bucky thinks, uselessly, _please let me be wrong. For him. Please._ When he shifts, Steve startles, leans forward and forces a smile that’s like a shot to Bucky’s chest. His eyes are bloodshot and ringed in shadows. “Hey.”

“Sorry.” Bucky feels like a car crash—a twisted metal husk, scraped to pieces, beyond repair. Nothing more than an explosion of debris, a million shards aimed straight for Steve’s heart.

“Don’t. It’s fine.”

“How long?” He’s so tired of asking.

“Only two days. Bet you pushed it too hard with the run. I know I’ve felt like—”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Bucky begs. He bites his tongue until he tastes blood. “Where’d I go?”

“Nowhere. You figured out pretty quick I wasn’t letting you leave, so you just wandered around the house. Tried to, uh…hurt yourself, once. Got a kitchen knife and…” Steve swallows. “Went for your neck.”

Bile surges up Bucky’s throat. He moans and rolls over, buries his head in the pillow and starts to shake. He thinks of the last person to witness his lost time, those three months back—an engineer in a Kiev safe house who’d worked on Bucky’s arm, who cooked him a hot meal, gave him a blanket and a painkiller, played classical music while he tweaked at the machinery. Bucky had closed his eyes, feeling safer with a stranger than he thought possible, and when he opened them he was drenched, shivering, tied to a chair while the engineer tossed buckets of ice water over his head. _Who is this for, Soldier?_ he’d demanded, wild-eyed, holding up a knife. _Still doing HYDRA’s good work, then? Come to finish the job?_

So the Soldier still had missions, Bucky assumed, orders and targets that were buried deep and couldn’t be ignored forever, couldn’t be suppressed by so feeble a force as Bucky Barnes. But maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe there was no mission. Maybe the knife was always meant for him.

Maybe, when Bucky felt _safe_ , felt _home_ , the Soldier came to—

“You were calm, Buck,” Steve soothes. “Easy to coax down. I got the knife away. You didn’t hurt me. There wasn’t any—”

“You should leave,” Bucky says. He can’t let Steve _near_ him, not when he’s programmed to self-destruct, a faulty piece of machinery with a fail-safe, a series of conditional statements disguised as a man.

_Comfort is unnecessary, and makes the Soldier unstable: if experienced, shut down and return for reprogramming._

(Get a car and head for DC.)

_If the Soldier cannot return for reprogramming, he has been compromised: if experienced, commence termination._

(Get a knife and go for the jugular.)

This time he’d been calm, but the next time? And the time after? The Soldier knew a hundred different ways to kill a person, including himself, and he never cared much about collateral damage.

“Bucky,” Steve says, his voice wrecked. The bed dips, and his hand drops to Bucky’s shoulder, thoughtless, heavy and warm, and Bucky springs off the bed, curls into the farthest corner of the room gasping for air before he knows what’s happened.

It comes back to him in waves, sweeping him out and pulling him under.

Steve _touched_ him. And touch was:

_two hands twined and swinging back and forth together._

_a bony wrist held tight in his fingers, a rapid heartbeat under his thumb._

_lips pressed snug to his own, in impulse, in gratitude._

_the sweep of a hand up his back, a warm circle of comfort inside a nightmare._

He’d forgotten.

He’s crying, suddenly, his eyes filling and breath hitching as Steve babbles apologies. His skin itches with want; he scratches his metal fingers down his arm, but it doesn’t relieve the ache, the sudden shivering, yearning. How had he gone so long without?

He’d _forgotten_ that hands could be gentle, that touches could soothe. He’d forgotten that the million tremors within him quieted at a strong hold and the warmth of skin. Fingers weren’t just for bruising, hands for restraining, callous and efficient. Heat could linger longer than the stinging bloom from a slap to the face, meant to be disregarded. He remembers, now: he’d _wanted_ touch, reached for it easily, took without pause, grasped and pinched and nudged and pushed and tried to get closer, always.

And they’d taken that from him. Carved out the part that made him alive and forced him to seek oblivion, instead. How _could_ they?

“Bucky?” Steve asks, and Bucky is speechless, paralyzed. He wants Steve close, and he’s petrified he’ll fall apart under Steve’s hands, start howling and never stop. Steve lowers himself to the ground and settles a few feet away, silent tears spilling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I’ll leave, if you want. Get Sam, and he can…” He takes a shuddering breath, wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “You can keep whatever’s here, and I’ll go back to—"

“Can I see your hand?” Bucky says. He needs Steve to stop talking, stop _crying_.

Steve gapes, but he doesn’t say anything, just sniffles, holds out his hand and turns it, palm up, on his knee. Bucky uncurls, reaches out carefully, his metal fingers hovering just above Steve’s hand. They’re steady, but the plates of his arm are shifting, agitated; even this part of him _wants_. “You remember,” he mutters.

“Remember what?” Steve’s attention is rapt, his eyes never leaving Bucky’s face.

“You’re gonna live forever.” Bucky lowers his fingers, brushes the tips of them against Steve’s hand, rubs at the lines in his palm though he can’t feel the skin, just the heat, the pressure. “I was wrong. I was wrong.”

“Not really,” Steve says, more than a little bitter.

“That’s not your life line.” Bucky strokes his pointer finger along the crease that crosses the top of Steve’s hand. “‘S your heart line. Big heart. Big punk.”

Steve gives him a watery smile. “Where’s the life line, then, since you know so much?”

“Here.” Bucky drags his thumb down the curved line arching around Steve’s thumb. “Still long. A miracle. Took a miracle to get you into the Army. Told you so.”

“Lemme see yours,” Steve says, reaching for Bucky’s other hand, and Bucky flinches back.

“I’ve got no life,” he says, curling his hand to his chest. He doesn’t want Steve to see, though it’s written all over him, in shadows, in scars. “I’ve got no heart.”

“Bullshit,” Steve growls. “You’re…Bucky, _you’re_ …” His hands clench and unclench at his sides.

“Will you stay with me anyway?” Bucky asks. He’s always been selfish when scared, asking for things he can’t have, demanding what no one can guarantee. He wants Steve to kiss his battered knuckles and ragged nails and run his fingers over every crease in Bucky’s palm, every indicator of his ruined heart and wasted life. But he can’t let himself be soothed only to blink out of existence again, not when Steve has asked just one thing of him—stay. He’ll live a frightened, longing half-life before he denies Steve anything else.

And yet.

The Soldier knows a hundred different ways to kill a person, including himself, and hadn’t. The Soldier can follow the path back to HYDRA blind and wounded, and hadn’t. And Bucky can chalk it up to faulty programming, or his brain healing, or strength, or luck, but maybe it’s something just as ingrained as a kill-switch. Maybe more so. Maybe even the Soldier understands that Steve Rogers is worth the work. “Just…be close,” Bucky says, “until…”

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says. He knows exactly how long. “Of course.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suicide Mention: Steve tells Bucky that, in one of his fugue states, he grabbed a knife and tried to slit his own throat (this is only mentioned, not shown in scene). Bucky comes to realize that he's been acting on a buried piece of programming that compels him to either return to HYDRA or, if compromised, kill himself to prevent further vulnerability.


	6. Renew (1)

“I have a metal arm, you know,” Bucky says, sighting his target—a rusted door on the southeast corner of the building 200 yards away—and adjusting his scope. The comm crackles with answering static. “Just in case you forgot."

No response. Bucky taps his earpiece. “Hello? This thing on? I swear, for all Stark brags about these pieces of—”

 _“Calm down, we hear you,”_ Sam says, overly loud to compensate for the wind. _“Maybe it’s time we get you off that roof. You feeling a little confused? Little lightheaded?”_

“I’m fine, Wilson,” Bucky says. He shifts, closes his right eye and turns his left to the sky, where Sam is circling the base, a pinprick above the trees. “This is easy shit. Try long-range, at thirty below, with a broken leg.”

 _“Yeah, and I bet you walked fifteen miles uphill in four feet of snow to get there, grandpa.”_  

“All I’m saying is, have you ever seen what a fist made of metal can do to someone’s face?” 

 _“Is that really something you want me to answer?"_  

Bucky winces. “Shit, yeah, okay. Bad example.” There are still things he doesn’t remember, of course, images from his past that flicker in and out like faulty projections, but he could never forget _that_ —the plummeting helicarrier and the damage he inflicted, the fractures and bruises and swelling so severe, Steve must’ve been half-blind for days afterward. Bucky wouldn’t know; he wasn’t there. He doesn’t think on it often. Self-preservation, and all that. “My point is—” 

 _“Please make it soon. I’m getting bored,”_ Natasha chimes in, a little breathless. Bucky hears grunting in the background, a symphony of pained yelps and cracking bone. He grins. 

“My _point_ ,” he says, “is that maybe we could expedite things if I was on the ground. Helping. Punching things. With my metal fist.” 

 _“What, you don’t think I’m doing a good job? That stings, Barnes.”_

“I think you’re doing a beautiful job, Romanoff. But every once in a while, I’d like to get off the damn roof and _do_ something.” 

 _“You know,”_ Sam says, _“Steve never stopped talking about how good a shot you were.”_

“Are,” Bucky corrects. 

 _“The pride of the 107 th,”_ Natasha says, _“the US Army’s finest.”_  

 _“Best marksman he ever knew.”_

_“On and on and on.”_ Natasha hums. _“Though I think if you went shot for shot with—”_

“Arrows are an entirely different matter and you know it,” Bucky says. 

 _“We need your ass up there with the rifle,”_ Sam says, _“so Steve will finally shut the hell up about it.”_  

 _“You know I can hear every word of this, right?”_ Steve says, accompanied by an echo of angry Russian bellowing. _“Status, Natasha.”_  

 _“Perimeter secure,”_ she says over one last agonized howl and a bodily thump.

 _“Sam?”_

_“No incoming threats for a good five in all directions, Cap. You’re clear.”_

_“Buck?”_

“You still headed for the south exit?” 

 _“So far.”_

Bucky stretches out and spreads his legs, digs his feet in and re-sights. “Then I’m set.” 

 _“Good. ‘Cause we’ve got 45 seconds to detonation.”_

Bucky frowns. “I thought you were blowing it remotely.” 

 _“Yeah, well, I had to improvise. More guards than I thought. One got hold of the detonator and—”_

A gunshot cuts Steve off, and Bucky flinches. “Steve?” 

Silence. Bucky’s mouth dries out. 

 _“Rogers? You with us?”_ Natasha asks, an edge to her voice. 

 _“Still here,”_ Steve says after a moment, and Bucky swears his relief under his breath.  _“Being pursued.”_

“No shit. How many?” 

 _“Two that I know of. Both armed.”_

“You ever think of disarming them with that fancy shield?” 

 _“Kinda busy trying to get out of the building before it blows. We’re gonna be running. You good for the shot?”_  

“So little faith, Stevie. Try long-range, at thirty bel—” 

 _“Focus, gentlemen,”_ Natasha says. 

“Fine, fine,” Bucky says. “I’ve got first out the door. Wilson?” 

 _“I’ll disarm the straggler.”_

“Right. Ready for you, Rogers. Get the hell out of there.” Bucky closes his eyes, inhales deeply, and starts to regulate his breathing. 

* 

Their mission was relatively simple: investigate a remote HYDRA base near the Russia-Ukraine border, a facility all but abandoned after the events in DC, save for a few low-ranking henchmen guarding a single tube of documents. “Fury thinks they’re schematics,” Natasha said as they shuffled through the file on Steve and Bucky’s kitchen table. 

“Does anyone else think it’s kind of weird that Natasha is the only one who talks to Fury?” Bucky asked while Steve flipped through a stack of maps and aerial photos. 

“No,” Sam said. “Not even in the slightest.” 

“And _how_ do you talk to a supposed dead man? Do you two tap out Morse code in abandoned payphones?” 

“You’re dating yourself, Barnes. Payphones are extinct,” Natasha said. “And you’re a spy, you figure it out.” 

“I’m not a spy anymore.” 

“Neither am I.” 

“You’re both spies,” Sam said, “now can we please focus on these schematics? What makes them so dangerous?” 

“Fury thinks they were drawn up during the Cold War,” Natasha said, “by Arnim Zola.” 

And Bucky felt like the air had been sucked right out of the room. Steve kept his head down, but his jaw was clenched, his grip tightening on the papers in his hands and crinkling the edges. Sam watched Steve a moment, before turning to Bucky. “Do we know what they’re for?” 

“We need to destroy them,” Steve said, adamant. 

“What if there’s useful information—” 

“Zola’s as dangerous dead as he was alive,” Natasha said. “If the schematics are in play, someone will be looking for them. It’s the safest option.”  

“HYDRA has armed soldiers guarding these at all times. No one's curious as to why?” 

Bucky moved to peer over Steve’s shoulder at the aerial photos. “We should blow it up.” 

Sam raised an eyebrow. “The whole building? For one little tube?” 

“We don’t know what else they’re hiding,” Steve said. “Could be nothing. Could be a whole hell of a lot more. And something tells me once we’re there, we won’t have much time to find out.” 

“Plus, we take another base, we leave HYDRA that much weaker,” Natasha said. “Even a small one is a psychological hit.” 

“It was a storage facility,” Bucky said, quietly, staring at the photo in Steve’s hand. “I think.” 

“For what?” Steve asked. 

“For me.” Bucky reached out and touched a metal finger to the building in the photo. “I remember the trees, the warehouses across the road. Leaving there, flanked by ten guards, guns at my head. They’d pulled me out of cryo and I was,” Bucky swallowed, “uncooperative. The arm was hurting more than usual. They gave it a few upgrades, rigged it so if I tried to mess with it…” When Bucky looked up, all eyes were on him. “Guess I have a hunch about those schematics.” He raised his metal hand and wiggled his fingers, the corners of his mouth twitching up in a sad smile. 

Sam crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. “Alright, then,” he said. “We'll blow it up.” 

* 

“Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three,” Bucky mutters, “c’mon, Steve, c’mon, c’mon, _c’mon_.” 

 _“Twenty seconds, Rogers, where are you?”_ Natasha asks. 

Just then, the rusted door on the southeast corner bursts open and Steve barrels out at full speed. Bucky takes another deep breath, his heart rate steady, his hands even steadier. A HYDRA guard staggers out after Steve, and Bucky tracks him, waits for the pause between exhale and inhale and pulls the trigger as the guard raises his own gun in Steve’s direction. 

It’s a clean headshot; he’s dead before he hits the ground. 

Bucky looks up in time to see Sam swooping down, guns drawn. The second guard startles, gets one shaky shot at Sam before he, too, is down in a heap just a few steps from the door, with Sam soaring straight back up, up, and away. 

 _“Hostiles are down,”_ Sam says. _“Natasha, you clear?"_

 _“Clear.”_

“Steve?” Bucky asks. 

 _“Clear. Seven seconds to—”_

The building explodes. 

“Shit!” Bucky drops flat and covers his head, more out of instinct than any real fear of flying debris. His ears are already ringing, and he can feel the heat from the blast on the backs of his arms. He lifts himself up on his elbows a few seconds later to see smoke billowing from the wreckage. “Seven seconds my ass.” 

Someone says something over the comms, but his hearing is still too muffled to make out any of it. He sighs, sits up and starts breaking down the rifle. “Dunno if you can hear me, Rogers, but we’re having words about this later. Think maybe you need to review a few things, like the concept of time, and how to count, and—” 

A shadow forms next to Bucky’s thigh, and he freezes. 

So maybe his abandoned warehouse wasn’t as abandoned as he thought. He curses himself for not hearing or seeing the door to the roof open, and takes a quick mental inventory of his weapons. The rifle’s out of commission: too much time to reassemble, and useless at this distance. There’s a gun on his back, but whoever’s behind him would see him grabbing for it. And the knife in his boot, which Bucky reaches for, slowly, carefully, before the man at his back says, “Do not try it.” 

Bucky stills. Alright, then. They’ll do this the hard way. “Not sure we’ve been introduced,” he says, relaxed and just a touch friendly. “James Buchanan Barnes.” 

 _“Buck, who are you talking t—”_

“This thing’s always on the fritz,” Bucky says, pulling out the earpiece and tossing it over the side of the building. The man—at least 6’3”, 6’4”, and solid as a rock—watches it fall, waiting, no doubt, for it to explode. Bucky jumps to his feet, casually dusting off his pants while the man whirls back around and levels a gun to his head. “They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.” 

“Quiet,” the man growls, and Bucky notes the blood caked to his head, a river of it dried to the side of his face, and his eyes: glassy, and a little unfocused. A minor concussion, at least. 

“Natasha got you good there,” Bucky says, pointing to his head. “She’s really something, ain't she?” 

“Shut up!” 

“Alright, alright.” Bucky holds up his hands in a clear sign of surrender. “You got me, buddy, I won't try anything.” 

“I will kill you anyway,” the man says, livid, his gun quivering. 

“Hmm,” Bucky says. “That’s one option. Not the one I’d go with, though. Because—and let me take a stab in the dark here—you know exactly who I am.” He nods at his metal hand.

“I am not afraid of you.” 

“Probably should be, but that’s beside the point. If you know who I am, you know what I’m worth to HYDRA. And you could be the one to bring me in.” 

“HYDRA wants you dead.” 

“Yeah, but only ‘cause I’m dangerous, right? What’s the HYDRA protocol when I wanna come quietly?” 

The man shakes his head, steadies himself. “This is a trick.” 

“No tricks.” Bucky turns his hands, like a magician with nothing up his sleeves. “Look, I’ll let you take my weapons, cuff me, whatever. Then, if the big guys want me dead, they can do it themselves, save you the trouble. But if you shoot me now, you might end up regretting it.” 

The man’s eyes flicker back and forth over Bucky’s face before he lowers his gun. “If this _is_ a trick,” he seethes, words dripping with disdain, “ _you_ will be the one to regret it. I know many ways to make you suffer. You will beg for death. It will be worse than anything in your nightmares.” 

And Bucky can’t help it; he laughs. The man raises his gun again, wary. “Sorry,” Bucky says, “sorry, I just. I thought you knew who I was.” 

“I know who you are, Winter Soldier.” 

“Then you know all about me,” Bucky says, tossing off the affable persona, suddenly steely. He takes a step forward, and the man, off-balance at the switch, stumbles back. “Or so the legend goes. Didn't you all whisper to each other about the ghost? The great war experiment? How he fell to his death, and survived? How they sawed off what was left of his arm, and gave him a weapon in its place? Put him in cryo. Yanked him out every few years for a big kill. Fried his brain with electricity.” He takes another step forward, the man a step back. “Again, and again, and again. Cryo. Kill. Wipe. Over and over and over.” 

Another step. The man glimpses over his shoulder, visibly nervous. “I killed presidents, world leaders, families, innocent men, women, children. I killed your friends. They sent me to kill my friend, and I almost succeeded. And then I spent a whole year learning how to be human, because they fried that out of me, too.” Bucky’s voice is low and razor-sharp, menacing in its precision. “So you really think you’re my worst nightmare? Pal, you’re not even fucking close.” 

“Stand back,” the man says, trembling. He tries to lift his gun, but Bucky holds it down with his metal hand, his thumb slotted between the man’s finger and the trigger. 

“There’s not a thing you could do to me right now that would even touch my worst nightmare. You wanna know how I know that?” 

“Stand _back_.” 

Bucky grabs a handful of his shirt. “I _said_ , you wanna know how I know that?” 

“How?” the man snarls, a cornered animal in a cage. 

“Because Steve’s right behind you.” 

Bucky releases his shirt, his gun, and steps aside just in time to hear the _clang_ of vibranium against the man’s skull. He goes down hard, and Steve, covered head to toe in soot, watches him fall, his chest heaving. 

“Took you long enough,” Bucky says. 

“The comms went down,” Steve says, eyes blazing. “Sam went to look for Nat. Neither of you were responding.” 

“Ah, her ears were probably for shit after the blast. And I, uh,” Bucky rubs at the back of his neck, “tossed mine off the roof.” 

Steve gapes at him. Bucky can practically feel his anger, radiating off him in waves. “You tossed it off the roof.” 

“Well, I couldn’t just say, _Hey, Stevie, there’s a big HYDRA goon with a gun up here, better hurry._ Figured if my comm went down, you’d know something was up. Got you here pretty quick, didn’t it?” 

Steve looks at him with an expression Bucky can’t quite read—nearly blank, but straining, holding back something immense. 

“It was a good diversion,” Bucky says, shifting from foot to foot. “He was concussed, so I knew I could—” 

“I thought you were dead,” Steve says, his voice frigid. 

“I’m sorry.” Bucky squirms. “Maybe we need a code word?” 

“I thought you were _dead_ ,” Steve says again, and Bucky’s heart does a little flip in time with his stomach. All at once, his walls shatter. His hands start shaking, and there’s a roaring in his ears, a pressure building in his head. 

It’s a trait of the Soldier’s he hasn’t been able to shake, this tendency to shove down his feelings during a mission, to box up every emotion until it’s over, until they’re safe, when it all comes bursting back to the surface. During his first mission with Steve’s team, Bucky had been almost cruel, barking orders and hissing snide comments and then breaking down in the Quinjet on the way home, sobbing his apologies while Steve held him. Their second mission, he and Steve had gotten into a screaming match as soon as they’d landed, close to blows before Bucky locked himself in the bathroom for a day and a half, furious and terrified in turn. 

It was an early coping mechanism for the Soldier, Bucky knew, before the mind wipes: if he couldn’t feel that constant, swirling storm of confusion and sorrow and agony, he could behave, and complete his mission, and escape whatever twisted punishment was waiting for him if he didn’t. And they’d found coping mechanisms for his coping mechanisms—Bucky spent more time with Sam and Natasha, learned to trust them, and that helped; he talked a lot during missions, blathered some of his stress out over the comms, and they chattered back; he got a German Shepherd named Star, a rescue with a limp and a big smile that sat with him during briefings. And so long as he could get a hand on Steve afterward, touch him and feel him warm and whole, he could calm down, keep himself in check. He was still a little blunt during missions, a little unsteady after, but it was manageable. It was good enough. 

“Steve.” Bucky reaches for him, now, inching towards distress. “Steve, I’m sorry.” 

Steve yanks his hand away from Bucky’s outstretched fingers, and Bucky pulls his own back to his chest, stung. “You don’t get it,” Steve says, shaking his head and rubbing a hand over his face. 

“I _do_ ,” Bucky says, “you know I do, I just—” 

“You know what I expected to find up here? Do you have _any_ idea?” Steve asks, pained, and before Bucky can respond, Sam lands beside them with Natasha in his arms. 

“Everyone alright?” he asks, lowering Natasha to her feet and pushing his goggles up on his head. 

“You didn’t make the rendezvous point. We were worried.” Natasha glances between Steve and Bucky like she knows exactly what’s going on. 

Steve shoves past Sam and heads for the exit. “We need a goddamn code word,” he says, swinging the shield onto his back and slamming the door behind him. 

Sam whistles.”You wanna tell us what that was all about?” 

“Not really,” Bucky says, still holding his arm, dizzy with remorse. “I wanna get the hell out of here.” 

* 

As soon as they get home, Steve changes out of his uniform and grabs his keys. “I’ll be back,” he mutters, barely looking at Bucky, and before Bucky can ask where he’s going, he’s gone. 

Bucky tries not to panic. 

He follows his routine as if Steve was there, changes into sweats and drinks a glass of water, wraps a blanket around his shoulders and sits on the couch with Star’s head in his lap. He focuses on the feeling of her coarse fur between his fingers, her happy huffs and snorts as he scratches behind her ears, the warmth of his leg beneath her chin. He closes his eyes and visualizes inhaling cool colors, greens and blues, and exhaling anxious reds and yellows. He tells himself, _Steve is coming back. Steve is coming back. Of course Steve is coming back._  

Fifteen minutes later, he calls Sam.

“Steve’s not coming back,” he says by way of greeting, holding his head in his hand. 

Sam sighs. “Of course he’s coming back. Guy just needs to blow off some steam, you’ll see.” 

“That was stupid. I shouldn’t have done that.” 

“Probably not. But you can’t always help it, man, Steve knows that. He can take care of himself.” 

“He shouldn’t have to deal with this shit.” Bucky grips the back of Star’s neck. She whines, and noses at his thigh. It’s an old argument, the same boring circle of self-loathing Bucky gets trapped in every time he’s spooked. He knows it, sees it, and can never, ever seem to stop it. 

“Lemme ask you a question,” Sam says. “Way back when—did you and Steve ever argue? He ever get so angry that he stormed out on you?” 

Sometimes Bucky has to go digging for memories, but this one springs instantly to life. “Yeah.” 

“Yeah?” 

“It was…Christmas. Christmas Eve. Steve was training day and night trying to get into the Army. He wanted to go down to the Y, and I told him it was useless, that they weren’t ever gonna take him.” Bucky also remembers a roomful of candlelight, a canvas painted just for him. A forgiving kiss. But Sam doesn’t need all the details. 

“Bet that went over well.”

 “‘Bout as well as you’d expect.” 

“Because Steve was a spitfire, right? Never did a thing he didn't want to?” 

“Little shit.” 

“When you weren’t around,” Sam says, “Steve was quiet. He did a lot of things just ‘cause he thought he had to, you know? SHIELD, the STRIKE team—he kept his head down and dealt with the secrets and the lies and a whole bunch of people he didn’t trust, until he just couldn’t anymore. And now, here you are, and he’s back to stomping around with smoke coming out of his ears, and it’s a damn breath of fresh air. So it’s not always the end of the world. It wasn’t then, was it? And it’s not now.” 

Bucky leans back and stares up at the ceiling. He turns Sam’s words over in his mind, letting them settle with a welcome weight. “Punk always knew how to put on a show.” 

“Oh, you’re one to talk. You just called me because _Steve is never ever coming back_.” 

“Shut up,” Bucky says. “This never happened.” 

“Yeah, yeah. Go snuggle it out.” 

Bucky hangs up, and calls Natasha. 

“What would you have done?” he asks, before she can say hello. 

“Your manners are atrocious,” she says through what sounds like a mouthful of food. “Did you just get off the phone with Sam?” 

“I need to know. Would you have done the same thing?” 

“Well, for starters, I would’ve had a code word _long_ before—” 

“Natalia. Please.” 

A few seconds of silence. Then, “You know the answer to that.” 

“But I want to hear you say it.” 

“Why? You need my approval for keeping yourself alive?” 

“Yes. No. I don’t know. I just—” 

“It was a good move,” Natasha says. Bucky can virtually hear her shrug. “And it worked. Steve would’ve gone to the rendezvous point if the comm hadn’t gone down. Probably saved your life.” 

“I asked that bastard to take me back to HYDRA. And he would’ve, too, if Steve hadn’t shown up. That’s fucked up, isn’t it?” 

“It was smart. It bought you time. And you and I both know he wouldn’t have made it that far.” 

“Yeah, but what—” 

“James. Enough,” Natasha says, leaving no room for argument. “You’re over-thinking it. The things you say to stay alive don’t mean anything. And I’m pretty sure Steve prefers you not dead.” 

“But I owe it to him to—” 

“You don’t. You were trained to complete and survive missions. That’s what you’ve been asked to do, and that’s what you’re doing. No one gets to tell you how. Not anymore.” 

Bucky rubs an eye with his fist. “So maybe I don’t owe him. But I want to make it easier on him. I know I’m not…” He waves his hand, searching, though Natasha can’t see it. 

“So we’re not easy to love,” Natasha says, matter-of-fact. “Doesn’t mean no one’s up to the challenge.” 

After Natasha hangs up, Bucky scoots down to the floor, sits cross-legged in front of the back door and gazes at the city lights through the glass, screwing up his eyes so they blur and multiply, Brooklyn shimmering and infinite in soft focus. He’s proud of himself for reaching out, for staving off a downward spiral into misery and incoherence. But he hates the come-down almost as much as the panic, the heaviness in his limbs that makes him think he might never get up again, won’t be able to, won’t want to. Both his hands are cold, though only one twitches with the need to touch, to soak up the warmth of another before he shrivels, lifeless in his isolation. Star flops down at his side and he tips forward, rests his head against the door and tells himself, _Of course Steve is coming back_. 

He closes his eyes and waits. 

The front door clicks open a few minutes later, and Bucky exhales the tension from his shoulders in one rushing breath that fogs up the glass. The guilt no longer matters, the needless search for culpability, because Steve is here, Steve is home, and that is far more than he once even dared to wish for. He listens to Steve shuffling around the living room, shucking his jacket and tossing his keys to the table before lowering himself, tentatively, beside Bucky. 

“Hi,” Steve says, holding a hand out, and Bucky accepts the comfort, threads his fingers between Steve’s without hesitation, no hint of a grudge held.  Steve rubs a thumb over his knuckles, and Bucky sighs. 

“How was your walk?” he asks, still leaning into the glass, breathing in time to the rhythm of Steve’s thumb against the back of his hand. One stroke at a time, Bucky comes back to life, his head quieting and limbs lightening, his heart thumping sturdy and content. _Your precious little heart_ , Sarah Rogers says in his head, _it’s gonna split clean in two, you keep up that worrying_. He smiles. 

“Cold,” Steve says. “Buck, listen, I’m sorry, I should’ve—” 

“Don’t.” Bucky silences Steve with a sideways glance. “We don’t have to have this conversation. I already had it.” 

“With who?” 

“Myself, mostly. Sam and Nat helped. It was very exhausting. I forgave you, you forgave me. End of story.” 

“Glad I could be a part of it.” 

“What’s the point? I got your number, pal. It’s always the same thing, and I’m just.” Bucky shivers. “I’m too tired.” 

“I know.” Steve lifts Bucky’s hand, presses a kiss to his fingers. “That’s why I should’ve been here.” 

“C’mon,” Bucky says, “Just once, let’s try _not_ beating ourselves up over this, yeah?” 

Steve huffs. “But we’re so good at it.” 

Bucky laughs and leans in, presses a quick peck to Steve’s lips because he can, because Steve always makes the best surprised faces, goes so wonderfully stupid and bleary-eyed. Because after all this time, he is Bucky Barnes—again, _still_ —and Steve Rogers is at his side, and that’s such a goddamn miracle, why on earth shouldn’t he? 

“Dick Olsen,” Bucky says as he pulls back. 

Steve tilts his head, a pleased smile plastered on his face. “Huh?” 

“You remember? We went to school with him. Mean little sonuvabitch.” 

“Yeah. Sure. But why—” 

“That’s our code word. I say that, you know trouble’s coming.” 

Steve blinks, momentarily dumbfounded, before he grins, his shoulders shaking faintly with laughter. “Not the easiest to work into a sentence.” 

“Yeah, but we’ll never mistake it for anything else.” 

“What in the world made you think of that?” 

“I dunno. He told me you were dead once when you were sick, and I kind of lost it, so.” Bucky shrugs. “It fits.” 

Steve sobers. “You never told me that.” 

“Never told you a lot of things.” Bucky pulls his hand away and bows his head, a familiar tendril of shame curling in his gut. “Wish I would’ve. Can’t remember all the things I should’ve told you, now.” 

Steve frowns, pats Bucky on the back. “Hey. Like you said—let's not. Come on. We'll just lie down for a while.” 

Bucky hoists himself up and moves toward the bedroom, but Steve tugs him back, shaking his head. Instead, he pulls the cushions off the couch, tosses them to the floor along with a blanket and motions for Bucky to lie down. Bucky’s knees nearly buckle in relief—sometimes, the bedroom feels too oppressive, coaxing him towards a heavy trap of night terrors he can't shake loose; others, the darkness and silence mock him, sleep eluding him between handfuls of rumpled pillows and soft sheets. He hadn’t been thrilled to find out which was in store for him tonight. 

But the living room is easy—the dim light of the television, the buzz of cars passing in the night, the hum of the refrigerator and Star’s gentle panting just a few feet away. Nothing about the living room goads him, _hurry hurry hurry up and sleep_. Bucky stretches out on his stomach and buries his head in his arms. Steve sits beside him, pushes Bucky’s t-shirt up and rubs circles up and down his spine, and Bucky floats, muzzy with bliss. 

“Feeling better?” Steve asks. Bucky grunts an affirmative. “Good. Think I owe you a couple back rubs for storming out like that." 

“‘S alright,” Bucky murmurs. “Doesn’t matter.” 

“You didn’t black out at all while I was gone, did you?” Steve asks, his hand faltering with premature guilt. “Even if it was just a few minutes, we should—” 

“Hasn’t happened in months. Promise.” Bucky reaches up for Steve. “Now get down here.” 

They curl up on the cushions, regardless of their size, of how close they must press together to fit. Steve tosses an arm over Bucky’s waist, and Bucky rolls onto his side, tucks his hand up under his chin and ducks his head, so Steve can’t see his face. “That guy on the roof was running his mouth, you know, saying shit like he was my worst nightmare, and I just…I knew I was gonna kill him. I had to kill him.” 

“You didn’t kill him, Buck, I did.” Steve pushes a hand through Bucky’s hair. “And you don’t have to explain. HYDRA's responsible for so much, and you—” 

“That’s not it,” Bucky says. “It wasn’t…revenge, or righteousness, or anything like that. I just thought, for one second, that he knew. That maybe he’d already killed you. And I snapped, because that’s it, Steve. That’s all I’m afraid of anymore. That you’ll be gone, and I won’t…” He turns his head into the cushions and squeezes his eyes shut. “I know it’s hard. I’m not easy to love. But I’m trying to—” 

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve breathes, bumping their foreheads together. “Bucky. That’s the problem. It’s too easy. Easy as breathing. I’m always thinking of you. Always was. I don’t have to wonder what I’d do without you. I know. So I…worry, when you’re not safe, when you’re reckless, like—” 

“Like you are,” Bucky says, and Steve laughs. 

“Yeah, like I am.” 

“Maybe we should just throw in the towel. Call it an early retirement. Save us the ulcers, huh?” 

“If that’s what you want,” Steve says, suddenly serious. “If you want to be done, Buck, say the word and—” 

“Don’t do that.” Bucky lifts himself up on an arm and glowers at Steve. “Don’t put that on me. You want to do this. Steve, you _need_ to do this. And…so do I. So just, don’t. We’ll make it work. We always do.” 

“Alright,” Steve says. “We’ll make it work.” 

They lie silently for a while, long enough that Bucky starts to drift off, lulled by the sound of Steve’s breathing, his chest rising and falling under Bucky’s hand, his breath rustling Bucky’s hair. When Steve shifts, he shifts with him, grumbling sleepily, “Alright?” 

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Go back to sleep.” 

“Sure? Y'can go to bed, 'm good here.” 

“Nah, Buck, I’m sure. I’m fine." Steve pulls him closer. "Like this. Breathe a little easier when you’re near.” 

And Bucky twists Steve’s hand up in his and buries his face in Steve's chest, his eyes prickling with elated tears because this, _this_ was all he'd ever wanted—to ease Steve's traitorous, stuttering lungs, to soothe Steve's aches, the same way Steve soothed his. He had not known then that each touch was so remarkable, each brush of skin a pledge to stay, through illness and death and war, and into the impossible—a plunge into the ice, together. They had held on far longer than any oath warranted, numb for decades, waiting only for it to be over, waiting, oblivious, to rise again.

Bucky squeezes Steve’s fingers—once, twice, three times—and the twin beating of their worried hearts whispers _safe, quiet, safe, home, safe, us_. They are done waiting. They sleep, and dream, fearless, of the next day, and the next day, and the next, because each new day is a promise, the same one they've been making, and will keep making, unbounded and willing, sealed in a thousand silent ways.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Enjoy any part of this? I'd love to hear about it! Drop me a comment or come say hey at cheesethesecond.tumblr.com!


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